Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments Hire Full-Time Tutor?

Let’s draw up a first draft of the job description. Teach 180 8-hour days across nominally 36 weeks. Teach 2 children in our home.

Lets say the private school tuition is $27,500 per child. For 2 children that is $55,000. Plus transportation costs. At a first cut, we could offer $60,000 salary.

So that is 180 x 8 = 1440 hours of work. Call it 1500. So the nominal pay is $40/hr. Without benefits.

So to me, $60K/yr for 3/4 time work (9 months out of 12), doesn’t seem out of line. Of course, this is just a nominal number, derived from private school costs here (SF Bay Area). And as we know, the cost of living here is high. The math would be different in Wisconsin.

This approach is important, and I’m glad to see the strong response on this thread, because in many areas the public schools serve gifted inadequately. (Here in the Bay Area, they put out a lot of poor-mouthing (not entirely unjustified for California schools) along with “well here all our children are gifted”). Or there are limited or no true gifted private schools.

I also think its instructive to compare this option with private schools. If a private school has 10:1 ratio, in a sense one could say a classroom takes in $275,000, and after say $90,000 of that goes to the loaded cost of the teacher, where did the other $185,000 get spent? Just saying. Some of it went to the facility, and some of it went to the administration. With home tutoring, the facility is already paid for, and the parents are acting as administrators. And parents/kids spend less time bus/van/commuting.

We could also contrast (private) school and home tutoring on a qualitative basis. The social aspect would be hard to backfill. (Though this doesn’t really cost the private school anything). Or, my home may not include a science lab and an art room. Or specialist teachers for that.

So this brings us back to the idea above of having a team of specialist tutors rather than one teacher. Using again the above analysis, nominally those tutors can be paid $40/hr, and we can buy 40 hours of specialist tutors every week for 36 weeks before we burn through our $60K budget. I am becoming convinced this may be more workable for the simple reason that its more flexible and less of an all-or-nothing approach. If the math teacher isn’t working out, we forge ahead with the rest of the team and there’s not a lot of disruption while a replacement is found. It sounds promising, the only caveat, remember, we are asking the tutor to teach 2 students not 1. Of course there is some flexibility in general: maybe the gym teacher costs less than the violin teacher; maybe not all 30 or 40 hours a week need to be booked; maybe we go outside to a science class.

Of course, this is all just on the back of an envelope. In the end it would boil down to the general supply and demand (thus price) for this labor category, in my geographic region. And beyond that, to actually finding a specific teacher and negotiating a deal. This is true for the single tutor or the multiple specialists approach. I have to believe that the right teacher would actually relish the idea of teaching just 2 (gifted) kids in a quiet setting, rather than 24 in a public school.

I think though what I would miss from the private-school-for-gifted, is the community of parents and educators and their knowledge and experiences with gifted. The school comes with built-in gifted peers, and does a lot for SEN for gifted. It would be hard to replicate this. Home tutoring is not a total free lunch, because the parents are left with, well its a bit like being your own general contractor on remodeling your house. Though there are benefits to being intimately involved with the details.