Driving Change: The other side of the table

By Michel Shane · Sat Aug 22 2026

Fourteen years. More than 1,300 students, all of them children from under-resourced families who could never have afforded this kind of help on their own. Eighty-seven percent of them move from failing to passing.

Those are the numbers people ask for when they ask about the program, and I hand them over every time. They are not the interesting part.

Here is a question I have put to a lot of rooms: Outside of family, coaching, or a paid job, when does a 19-year-old choose to spend an hour, twice a week, tutoring a 12-year-old to improve their schoolwork?

Not often.

A 19-year-old lives mostly among other 19-year-olds. A 12-year-old lives somewhere else entirely. Seven years is not a large gap at any other point in life, but at those ages, it can feel like a generation. Left alone, these two people would never sit at the same table.

My wife, Ellen, built the program around that gap, and she did not build it alone.

When our daughter, Emily, struggled in middle school, we went looking for help. She had learning differences; she was creative, she loved to dance, and the traditional classroom was not built for a kid like her. What we learned through trial and error was that a college student reached Emily in a way no older adult could. Close enough to be cool. Old enough to be credible. We saw it work while she was still with us.

After Emily died, Ellen understood what that meant. The thing that had worked for our own daughter was the thing worth building for every other child like her, and she went and built it.

Ellen had no background in building an educational program. What she had was Gene Bream, a teacher so impressive that when I sat in his classroom at a parents' night, all I could think was that I wanted to go back to school and be in his class.

Gene taught for over 40 years, part of that in Malibu, and thousands of children passed through his classroom, Emily among them. He told us that he never knew what she might raise her hand to say. Sometimes she said something so sharp it went straight to the center of the lesson. Sometimes it came from somewhere else entirely.

One day in class, she could not sit still. She was trying to get his attention, hand up, and he told us afterward he stood there thinking, “Should I call on this child, or should I not?” Finally, he called on her. Emily looked at him and said, “Mr. Bream, I have a question for you. Why is it called history? Why is it not called herstory?”

Gene was still teaching when he and Ellen first sat down together, on his way toward retirement but not there yet, and he offered to help her build something for children like the one who had asked him that question.

He and Ellen designed the program together. Ellen knew what to call it: SEA, Successful Educational Achievement. We live by the ocean, and it was a good play on words. The name stuck.

Just as important, they designed the training for the young people we call mentor/tutors, because no playbook for this kind of relationship existed. They had to invent one.

The training is not simply about subject matter. It teaches a mentor/tutor to guide a child toward understanding instead of handing over an answer, which is a far harder skill. It prepares them for the ways a struggling student dodges the subjects that make him feel defeated. And it insists they know the material cold, because a child stuck in math or science can tell within minutes when the person across the table is bluffing.

These mentor/tutors are not credentialed teachers, and that is part of the design. Put a credentialed adult in that chair and a struggling 12-year-old may hear the same voice already tied to his difficulty. Put a trained college sophomore there instead, and he hears someone who stood where he is standing only a few years back and found a way through.

The child gets what you would expect. Stronger grades. Renewed confidence. Somebody in his corner, often for the first time.

The mentor/tutor gets just as much, and sometimes more.

They walk in expecting to explain fractions. Instead, they find a young person watching their every move and deciding, week by week, whether they are worth trusting. They cannot coast on being older. They have to arrive on time, stay patient, and tell the truth, because the child across the table will spot a phony instantly. Most of these college students have never once been the person someone younger depended on. Then, for an hour twice a week, they have to become that person.

They leave having changed. I have watched it happen more than a thousand times.

That exchange of responsibility is also the idea behind the part of the SEA Program people most often misunderstand.

A family pays no money for this. But we do not tell the student the program is free.

Free has no value. Free carries no responsibility. Miss something free, and you have lost nothing, so it is easy to miss.

Instead, the student pays in a different currency. For every session he receives, he owes an act of kindness or a good deed to someone else. We call it Pass It Forward. It is not charity, and it is not a slogan. It is the price, and the price is the point.

Having something to give creates commitment. Commitment creates responsibility. And responsibility is usually where real change begins, when a child stops seeing himself only as someone who needs help and starts to understand he has something of value to offer as well.

Many years ago, a middle school girl in Oxnard entered the SEA Program. When she moved on to high school, she aged out, and we had no part in what came next.

She made it through high school and went on to college. Then, years later, now a college student herself, she came back to the SEA Program to give another student what she had once been given, because it had made a difference in her life.

She had once sat on one side of that table. For a time, she sat on the other.

That is the whole program. It took 14 years, one retiring teacher, and one girl who could not stop asking questions to see it clearly.

I can be reached at 21milesinmalibu@gmail.com