TUTORIAL CENTERS HELP EAGER STUDENTS BETTER COMPETE NUMBER OF VALLEY PROGRAMS HAS GROWN WITH DEMAND.

Byline: ALEX DOBUZINSKIS Staff Writer

SANTA CLARITA -- Students in the Santa Clarita Valley are working overtime, boning up on math or English at private tutorial centers to slice through the competition and get to college.

The school bell may have rung this week at Valley public schools, but for students who attended tutorial centers during the summer, school -- in a way -- was already in session.

Students also attend the tutorial centers after-school. Some parents pay hundreds of dollars a month to have their children in a center.

``I don't think that the parents in Santa Clarita Valley are unlike parents anywhere who are middle class,'' said Terry Deloria, director of special programs at the William S. Hart Union High School District.

``When you have parents who have gone to college ... they want to make sure that their families have the same opportunities,'' she said.

The number of tutorial centers in the area has grown.

Math Support Services owner Peggy Cannastraci says when she opened her center in 1993, it was one of only a handful in the valley.

Today, the same area has more than a dozen centers. Some are independently owned while some are franchises of larger companies, such as Score Educational Centers and Kumon Math and Reading centers.

Cannastraci, whose husband is a surfer, has decorated the interior walls of her Math Support Services with seashells and paintings of dolphins and beach scenes. But the welcoming atmosphere, with walls painted different colors, belies the hard work going on.

``Math is this ladder where, if algebra is difficult, geometry is one level more,'' Cannastraci said.

Tenth-grader Kelsey Muir is one of the teens climbing the math ladder at the center. Her goal is entry into a University of California school, a difficult prospect, and she worried when she started ``struggling'' in math.

But Muir never saw her math grades dip below A's and B's. She just felt some math concepts were slipping beyond her grasp.

``I want to be able to have a future, and with a job,'' she said. ``I don't want to be struggling my whole life with trying to earn money with a job that doesn't give me enough.''

Some Antelope Valley tutoring centers get funding from local public schools, because federal law requires schools to underwrite outside help for students if they fail to meet academic benchmarks, Deloria said.

But in the Santa Clarita Valley, schools aren't failing and the local tutorial centers are supported by tuition fees, she said.

The Hart District offers free help after school and during the summer to students who are struggling.

Dr. Sungwon Kim is one of the few tutorial center directors with a doctorate.

Kim, who teaches mainly Korean-American students at his SAT Academy in Valencia, likes to hold up a book at eye-level and ask his students if they can read the front cover, which they can't. Then he puts the book lower than eye level and asks them to read the cover: an object lesson that their comprehension needs to be higher than their class material to succeed.

The lesson appears to not be lost on the students, many of whom want to enter Ivy League schools or the University of California system.

``Everyone wants to go there,'' he said. ``That's why it's more competitive.''

alex.dobuzinskis(at)dailynews.com

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(color) Sungwon Kim teaches a math class at his SAT academy in Valencia. There are several tutorial centers in Santa Clarita where high school students can get extra help with their classes.

David Crane/Staff Photographer