Veteran Tutors: Disabled Veterans Helping Teachers and Students

VeteranTutors is a nonprofit organization set up to help ease the return of disabled veterans to civilian life. Half of the military personnel who are discharged with disability never obtain civilian employment. With the flood of young veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with grievous injuries, a group of older veterans began VeteranTutors as a means to sponsor these young veterans and to help train them for civilian careers.

We quickly learned that all of the returning veterans wanted nothing more than to return to their units. When faced with the reality that they could no longer serve on active duty, finding an appropriate new mission that would let them continue to serve their country and their fellow-citizens is for some a life-saving experience and for all a pathway to healing.

Mission: Help Keep Economically Disadvantaged Youth In School Until They Graduate

More than half of the students in our public schools come from economically disadvantaged families. Half of them will drop out before they graduate high school. In other words, more than a quarter of the next generation of Americans will be unprepared to enter a workforce that increasingly requires skills dropouts simply do not have.

It should come as no surprise that a great many of today's disabled veterans also come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. Many considered the military a step towards acquiring employable skills. With their military careers cut short, these veterans also lack many of the skills they will need to obtain a civilian job that pays well.

The mission of Veteran Tutors is to help keep economically disadvantaged youth in school until they graduate and to make sure they have the science, technology, engineering and mathematics skills to compete in the digital economy. For all of the above reasons, this is a mission that resonates with young veterans and addresses one of our society's most acute needs.

Dropout Intervention and Recovery Initiative

Veteran Tutors' Dropout Intervention and Recovery Initiative is a joint effort of experienced educators and disabled veterans dedicated to helping economically disadvantaged students graduate from high school with the science, technology, engineering and mathematics skills they will need to compete in the digital economy. Our approach is based on research conducted by Steven D. Levitt, an economist at the University of Chicago, whose analysis of the records of the 400,000 students in the Chicago Public Schools over a period of twenty years found that the only students who saw a dramatic change from transferring to another school were "those who entered a technical school or career academy. These students performed substantially better than they did in their old academic settings and graduated at a much higher rate than their past performance would have predicted."

Our Dropout Intervention and Recovery Initiative prepares students for Careers for the 21st Century© where students of all backgrounds have the opportunity to find classes that fire their imaginations, give new importance to school and help them achieve recognition in positive ways that are meaningful to them, to their families and to their community.