By Janis Fontaine
There’s more to being a tutor these days than just being able to teach, Evan Weisberg says.
Weisberg grew up in Boca Raton and graduated from Spanish River High School. He started tutoring as a side business, doing SAT and ACT prep while he was attending Florida Atlantic University, spending about three years learning the business. Weisberg saw a lot of problems in the system and he lay awake at night thinking of ways to fix them. He earned a bachelor’s in English from FAU in 2008, and a master’s in special education from the University of Phoenix in 2010.
He started Tutors of Highland Beach as a sole proprietor, then opened the corporate Tutors Who Care a few years later. By 2017, he was tutoring seven days a week and turning clients away, so he took a risk and brought on his first employee. Today he has nearly 60 tutors working for him and he’s constantly searching for more.
Weisberg, 36, says he doesn’t have time to tutor any longer, which he misses, but he knows he has more important roles now.
“My job is to solve problems and create opportunities,” he says, and he believes his success hinges on three things: Is the tutor happy? Is the parent happy? Is the student making progress?
“In a nutshell, it’s ‘How well did we meet the clients’ expectations?’”
He adds: “A good fit is the most important facet. I’m a matchmaker, personality-wise. I won’t take a client if I don’t have a good match.”
Liz Hiden of Boca Raton hired Tutors Who Care for her daughter, Taylor, a senior at Olympic Heights High School, to prepare for the SAT.
“The tutor was really able to reach my daughter, which can be hard with teenagers,” Hiden says. “They met in a safe, public place because I work, and the cost was reasonable.
“But the thing that really stood out was that Taylor would come home in a good mood. She enjoyed meeting with her tutor. It’s hard to judge how well it’s going, but judged by my daughter’s mood, I felt good about the whole process. I would definitely hire him again,” she said.
That’s good matchmaking in action. But being a Tutors Who Care tutor is a hard role to fill because Weisberg has high expectations. His tutors are more like life coaches than academic taskmasters.
His tutors work in person, meeting face-to-face, despite the pandemic. That’s what parents want and what the students need, he says.
“Everyone has a different level of comfort with COVID,” Weisberg says. Some tutors were uncomfortable with in-person assignments, so Weisberg scrambled to find replacements.
“COVID not only increased the need for tutors, because virtual learning was in many cases ineffective, it also decreased the number of tutors willing to work,” he says.
Weisberg’s company specializes in kids with learning challenges, and that’s part of the reason in-person tutoring is imperative.
“I tutored kids with ADD, dyslexia and Asperger’s, and I found it more rewarding, more fulfilling in a lasting way. I had one student with Asperger’s who didn’t speak to me until the 20th session,” Weisberg says.
Once the door opened, student and tutor found a lot of common ground.
Kids today need help with “executive functions, especially the boys,” Weisberg says. Executive functions are the mental processes that allow people to focus their attention, remember basic instructions, plan for the future and multitask. They are building-block skills that are fundamental to learning and development.
“Middle school is the toughest group,” Weisberg says.
To be successful, tutors have to be “self-sufficient, enthusiastic and passionate about teaching,” he says. His clients are “affluent and can be demanding, so tutors have to have strong social skills and be ready to handle any situation.”
Weisberg, a former hip-hop performer, started using “educational music” he wrote as a conduit to reach kids he couldn’t reach in other ways. He started by laying down beats and making up lyrics to teach multiplication tables and basic math principles. For a select few students, the rhythms and rhymes were just the ticket they needed to get into the game.
Weisberg says he was bred to be an entrepreneur as the son of a New York City schoolteacher and toy company executive turned financial planner.
“My mother taught in the toughest neighborhoods, including Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant,” Weisberg says.
His father transplanted the family to Boca Raton when he changed careers when Evan was 5 years old. They still live in the city.
Tutors Who Care CEO Evan Weisberg unwinds with his horse Gilles, a Dutch warmblood, after a week supervising nearly 60 tutors. They all work in person with students. Photo provided
Weisberg’s newest passion is horses, and he has two. He tries to surround himself with things that make him feel good, and right now one is a nimble-footed quadruped named Gilles.
Weisberg says he looks at his life like it’s a masterpiece he’s painting. You have to take risks, he says. Try new colors.
And one thing Weisberg knows for sure: “Regret is way worse than failure.”
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