Tutor Builds Hope Around the World

As a tutor, Brien McMahon High School senior Pavlina Schriel helps her clients build their reading and mathematics skills. As a volunteer, she helps build schools where young children get a chance at an education.

“We worked alongside the villagers, and they hosted us in their homes,” Pavlina said of her visit to Nicaragua last year as a part of the high school's BuildOn program. BuildOn is a national organization that works to raise up under-resourced communities around the globe.

“The school they had was just a shack that was falling apart. It barely had a roof,” said Pavlina. She spent her February vacation helping to give the village a proper school building. “I really wish I could have spent more time there. I want to go back.”

Pavlina serves as the president of her high school's BuildOn club. She learned about the club when she arrived at Brien McMahon High School as a freshman. She fell in love with it after just one meeting.

If helping people around the world have a better quality of life weren't enough, Pavlina also offers her services as a student mediator. Her peers can petition to have her step in and listen to their grievances before an issue degenerates to violence.

“We can attempt to solve a situation where they might be more open to us, as students, than to the administration,” said Pavlina.

She is also the secretary of the National Honor Society and a student producer with the drama club. Between all of that, she still finds time to work with Peer2Peer Tutors.

Pavlina said she likes Peer2Peer's model of pairing clients with high school students as tutors. “Kids are much more willing to listen to teenagers or someone their own age,” she said. “The little kids kind of look up to us.”

Though she helps with most subjects, Pavlina wishes for more clients interested in one specific topic. “My forte has always been music, no pun intended,” she said.

All of her work ultimately comes around to how Pavlina views herself. “I am definitely a people person,” she said.

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