Community
15 Jan 2025
2024 Transform RI Winner Sebastian Connolly Working to Create State Wide Tutoring Program
The 2024 winner was Sebastian Connolly. His winning idea is to create an inter-school tutoring program that would recruit students from Rhode Island high schools with the most resources/best educational outcomes to tutor their peers at underserved schools in the state. The 2024 Classical High School valedictorian drew on his own experience tutoring students from Providence’s underserved communities at the Boys & Girls Club of Providence and saw first hand the impact tutoring had on these students. For his transformative idea, Sebastian received a $25,000 scholarship and has a seat at the table as the Papitto Opportunity Connection (POC) invests $1 million to make his idea come to life.
“My senior year I started tutoring at Dr. Jorge Alvarez High School through the Boys and Girls Club,” said Sebastian, who is now a freshman at Harvard University. “I saw that for the students there, because they didn’t have the same tutoring infrastructure that exists at Classical, what I was doing made a lot more of a difference.”