Pros
The kids are adorable, and it's so cute how excited they get when they see you. Honestly the kids are the best part of the job. Seeing them improve their reading skills and hearing from the teachers that your kids (they will all become 'your' kids) are doing really well or have more confidence or have started participating in class really makes it worth it. And when they bring you cool erasers or the stickers out of their happy meal or candy after Halloween just because they love you, your heart will melt. For an AmeriCorps position, the stipend is pretty good, and the amount depends on where you live. I like that being a Regional Site Coordinator allows you to go to different school sites because I would be bored sitting at the same school everyday like the Site Coordinators have to do. Also, maybe it's just my region, but my coworkers are awesome. Most of us are cool outside of work, and being close to one another makes the job easier. We're very supportive of one another and when anyone needs an last minute fill in for a tutoring spot or someone to come in on Friday for make up sessions, there's always someone willing to do it. RSC's get mileage for traveling between their school sites, which is dope.
Cons
Training is long and boring. I literally didn't have the attention span to digest, understand and remember most of what we learned. It's necessary, I guess, but by the end of the first week I was over it and ready to just start working with the kids. I really hate the ongoing trainings we have when the kids are out of school, even though I know it's necessary so we can hit that 1700 hours by the end of our term. TRS is awful. I'm not even going to explain it, just know it sucks. For awhile I didn't really know what my job was, but it's one of those things where you just have to go with the flow and you'll figure it out along the way. It can be hard if the staff or teachers in the school you are working in aren't particularly cooperative or supportive, and that's something that just has to be worked out on a case by case basis. Reminding people that you are there to help the kids seems to go a long way in my experience. I would say that the biggest con I've dealt with so far this year is that there are constraints on how much you can actually do. For example, I work in a school where 100 of the third graders were referred to us because they were significantly behind grade level in reading. Even if we had enough tutors to cover all of those kids, we don't have the space for 100 kids let alone 100 just from the third grade. So we have this huge list of kids that we just don't have room for. Knowing that you can't get everybody is kind of heartbreaking, especially when they're excited to come. I will walk down the hall in any of my schools and multiple kids come up to me and ask "when are you going to get me?" or "can I come this time?" The exact same thing happens every time I pick up and drop off the children that are already enrolled in our program. Some other issues are that things can be unorganized at times, but that may be because I work in one of the newer regions.
