After meeting at Springfield Technical Community College, Vilenti and Yeselie Tulloch went on to not only build a life and family together, but also a business called the Academic Leadership Association.
This program empowers young people at schools in Springfield and Holyoke by addressing their social-emotional needs through mentorship, literacy, and self-advocacy.
Zydalis Bauer spoke with Vilenti and Yeselie to learn more about the program.
Read the full transcript:
Zydalis Bauer, Connecting Point: After meeting at Springfield Technical Community College, Vilenti and Yeselie Tulloch went on to not only build a life and family together, but also a business called the Academic Leadership Association.
This program empowers young people and serves schools in Springfield and Holyoke by addressing their social-emotional needs through mentorship, literacy, and self-advocacy.
I spoke with Vilenti and Yeselie to learn more about the program.
Vilenti Tulloch, Academic Leadership Association: So, we’re a school-based organization, so we partner with schools and the district,. Once we develop a contract with that particular school, we identify — we work with their leadership team to identify the students considered most at risk. So, we look at whether it’s grades, behaviors, attendance, and try to figure out what the needs of that student are and then we assign our mentors.
Zydalis Bauer: And I know that the program started around the beginning of the pandemic, and you were only in one school, but right now you’ve grown to about 14 schools in Holyoke and Springfield.
Tell me about what you do in the schools and how it feels to have this program grow.
Vilenti Tulloch: It feels amazing. You know, God is good. You’re right, we did start with one school. Principal Michael Calvin, he really took a risk on us and, you know, allowed us to not only begin working with his school, but develop our own systems while doing so, right?
So, it was tough with the pandemic, but it allowed us to build a stronger foundation for our program. But at least the school noticed how important something like this was to address the social-emotional needs of each student. We do multi visits a week with each student just checking in, and then we have a day we run after school sessions, which is for group counseling. We run groups with the kids, and we do recreational activities. We have monthly field trips and a lot of great things just around the program.
It’s always been a need, there’s nothing like it in the area. I haven’t found anything like it really in — in the nation.
Yeselie Tulloch, Academic Leadership Association: But once the students are identified, you know, they work with them one on one, they work with them collectively as a group — and it’s about the relationship building with the students.
Zydalis Bauer: And I was going to say, although that — the business is called the Academic Leadership Association, you focus more than just on academics. And I know social-emotional learning, self-advocacy is really big in your business.
Why is it important to foster these types of skill sets as well, beyond academics?
Vilenti Tulloch: Our kids come to school every day and they deal with a lot, like outside of school. They carry a lot of things in school with them, where it’s the resiliency of our kids, the perseverance that they just show is — is incredible.
A lot of them don’t get enough credit, but, you know, they need that support, right? We can’t just expect kids to navigate through all these hardships — or navigate through, like, not even just hardships, but like just peer relationships that they struggle with, just knowing who they are. And, you know, on top of that, you have to do school, right?
So, you got the social component, but then you have to sit in the classroom and listen to this teacher — and if you guys, you know, they identify these students that are considered at risk, right? But if they’re already struggling and they don’t have that relationship with their teacher, our job is to come in and not only let the student know that they’re being supported, but also, we’re advocating for them, helping them build capacity so they can advocate for themselves.
But also, we’re working with teachers to figure out like, all right, where is the gaps here? Where are we struggling to — why are we struggling to build this relationship?
Zydalis Bauer: And you both know firsthand the impact that a community school and a community organization can have on your education and your future.
Vilenti, you have even said that if it wasn’t for a community college, you might have not even gone to college at all.
So, talk to me about this educational pathway that you both have gone on, and what made it successful for you, and how can you duplicate that success for other students in the community?
Yeselie Tulloch: For me, education was always something that was important and, you know, not a lot of family members in my family, you know, have degrees or went to college. So, STCC, like going there, it gave me an opportunity to figure out, “okay, what do I want to do? What path do I want to take?”
So, from there, I transferred, got my bachelor’s at Westfield State, and then eventually I transferred to Bay Path and was able to obtain my MBA.
So, just that, you know, coming from a Latino family and, you know, born and raised in Springfield, I went to school from kindergarten all the way to 12th grade in the Springfield Public Schools. So, I know how important it is to be able to model the same thing for other kids who maybe don’t have the opportunity or the money to go to schools.
Zydalis Bauer: Did you both imagine that this is the type of work that you would be doing when you started your educational careers?
Vilenti Tulloch: I did. I started working in a school in Southbridge, and probably two weeks into the school year, one of the administrators came to me was like, you know, “You should start a mentoring program — our kids need it.”
There was a lot of time spent in the hallways, just a lot of behaviors, a lot of fights — and this is elementary school — a lot of fights at recess, you know. So — and it was — it was a group of boys that were, you know, like they were just kind of they were high fliers, right?
So, I started mentoring there with a fellow teacher and we really started to see growth in not only these students, but as a school – like, the school culture improved, right?
So, I worked with Yeselie, Yeselie has an MBA — she helped me with like the — the basically, like the structure of the program, like how to create a business plan, how to, you know, basically, formulate this program that will allow us to contract with schools, right? So, while I worked on the — the program, and its curriculum, and all these things, Yeselie was like the mastermind behind the scenes, putting together the business operations.
Zydalis Bauer: And so, being that you both were raised and from this community and understand the struggles and the things that these students really need — what message would you like to share with other students and people that may be watching?
Yeselie Tulloch: My parents were teen parents, so, you know, I didn’t really have like anyone to model how important, you know, education is or someone to basically pave the way for me. So, you know, there are people out there that are willing to help. There are, you know, , — we offer mentoring services to children, you know, building their relationships.
And like you said, when did — if doing this work, when did I realize this was something that I wanted to do? Because when I went to school, I didn’t know that I’d be doing what I do now. And for me, I would say it goes back to when I started working with children back in — for the Key Program. That’s probably when I started to understand, like the relationships with the children — relationship, having relationships with children and just being present and being there for these kids.
It’s important. You know, there’s not — not everyone has someone that they can look up to.
Vilenti Tulloch: We believe that every kid deserves a voice in their education, right? And they deserve some — some level of autonomy when it comes to how they learn, right? And I think that we have to do a better job not only modeling the expectations that we have for our students, we also should not lower our expectations, but continue to raise them academically.
So, how do we give – how do we provide our kids with the safe space to, you know, to self-advocate, right? But also, persevere without giving up on them, right?
So, again, our job is to ensure that they have that voice, ensure that the families have a voice, but also the teachers, right? Like, how can we bridge that gap in the learning for our kids?
