Due to the increase in the number of COVID-19 cases in Chicago and Cook County, Cluster Tutoring will pivot to remote tutoring for the next few weeks.

Executive Director Kara Kalnitz and the Cluster Tutoring Board decided that the safest approach was to postpone the return to one-to-one tutoring on all three nights. There will be no tutoring at any of Cluster’s meeting spots. Instead, tutors and students are encouraged to meet on their own, virtually, the way tutoring took place during the 2020-21 school year.

The omicron variant of the novel coronavirus seems to be even more transmissible than previous variants. So the safest approach seems to be remote learning for a while.

Kara will provide a Zoom link that tutors and students can use to connect if they want to stick to their usual time and meeting night. Tutors and students who want to meet at a different time can do so over Zoom, FaceTime, or Google Meet. Tutoring sessions do not have to last 90 minutes, as tutor-student pairs have found that it might be difficult to engage on a virtual platform for that long.

Cluster plans to resume in-person tutoring the week of Jan. 17. For any questions, contact Kara Kalnitz ([email protected]; 773-378-5530).

For those of you who are still not vaccinated, this link provides information on where to get shots near you in the city of Chicago, whether that’s at a community site or a pharmacy, or through a health care provider. Or call the city’s COVID-19 hotline at 312-746-4835.