Mount Olive Resident Who Tutored Refugees is Recognized by President Joe Biden

For 16-year-old Mount Olive resident, Ragav Balusamy, it started as a personal service project during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Currently a junior at the Morris County Vocational and Technical School in Denville, Balusamy during his sophomore year tutored refugee children online through the Forging Opportunities for Refugees in America (FORA) program. “Obviously, immigrant children and their parents might not have the best access to education,” he explains. “A lot of them are behind in terms of school and studies. So, that program was setting out to help them catch up, essentially help them recover what they lost, or help them catch up to their friends and peers at school. There are different subjects and proficiencies that they have, so I was teaching them math and a little bit of English.”

Balusamy, who taught for 102 hours, was recognized by President Joe Biden and the White House, receiving in December 2021 both a gold medal and letter of recognition for his service.

Balusamy had reached out to Michael O’Conner, FORA Co-founder, Board Member, and volunteer, seeking to make an impact. “I was looking to help people who need it, rather than just like an ordinary tutoring program,” he says. “To help and volunteer for a good cause.” O’Conner responded to Balusamy and both discussed it, and O’Conner set Balusamy up with a first student, and he started his tutoring.

When he completed his 102 hours of service, Balusamy didn’t rest, instead hopping back in and starting computer science tutoring, this time using a program called ALUNNOR, which led to him birthing a new initiative. “ALUNNOR is more of a locally based program that past students in my high school had created,” he says. “It's kind of specialized based on the academy that I’m in. Before I joined, I don't think there was a position to teach coding, but I reached out and I talked to some of the people who created it, and we made an agreement where you could teach coding as one of the subjects.” He again started with a lone elementary school student. “I taught her different subjects, different languages, such as Java, C++, HTML, CSS, JavaScript - really fundamental languages and just the basics in them, nothing too complex.” Balusamy then realized he could potentially be doing the same thing more often with bigger groups. “I could reach out to more people, impact more people. That's actually the inspiration for where my Koding For Kids initiative started.”

For Balusamy, who is looking into technical schools like the University of Washington, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon, and Stanford (“They are my dream colleges,” he says), right now his focus is on his school work at MCVTS and Koding for Kids. “In terms of my future plans for my organization, there are other kids in my school who are looking to do similar things who might not have the initiative to start an entire program,” Balusamy says. “They might just be looking for a program to join, so I reached out to them through my teacher, Mr. (Steven) Hendricks, and we sent out something in order to get more people to join our organization. And so far, I've gotten a couple of people asking to join, and I've gotten friends that aren't from my school wanting to join as well.” Balusamy’s next step is to extend his reach. “Maybe in one or two months, we're going to start reaching out to schools - like public high schools, middle schools, elementary schools - just talking to them and talking to kids about how easy it is to get into computer science, the capabilities of computer science, what you can do with computer science, and really demonstrate to them that it's really easy to get started in computer science at a young age. It's not this complex notion that you have to do it at a later age. We want to break the stigma or the difficulty of computer science, because when you think about it, everything in the future is completely revolving around computer science as of right now.”

For more information about Koding For Kids, visit their website at www.koding4kids.com. Also, if any institutions or students want to get involved with the program, Balusamy can be contacted at [email protected].

Photo courtesy of Ragav Balusamy