Youth Mentor

This is not a teaching position. This is a role in motivation.

The most meaningful way to support a student who reaches 99% of their target is to make clear that it is not finished. If that principle feels uncomfortable, this role is not for you. If it resonates because you know that maintaining high expectations is how you communicate belief in a student's ability, continue.

Alpha students complete their academic work using AI-driven applications. There are no lectures or textbooks. You will spend half of each day facilitating one-hour workshops focused on life skills: public speaking, concentration, and delivering and accepting meaningful feedback. The other half, you work directly with students individually or in small groups, analyze their progress via Coachbot analytics, and challenge each one to reach 100% of their weekly app targets. You will not follow a script—workshops provide a foundation, but the strongest performers in this role customize and create new sessions when needed.

A successful quarter means every student in your group completes their weekly app goals, passes the Test2Pass for all life-skills workshops, and 90%+ report that they love you. Falling short on any of these three is falling short of the role. In your first year, you will master the framework; as you demonstrate the ability to uphold standards, the opportunity opens to advance to Lead Guide, where you mentor new hires while continuing to work with students.

If you prefer conventional teaching methods, expect a ready-made curriculum, or view warmth and rigor as incompatible, this is the wrong fit. If you have been a sports coach, a camp leader, a tutor who refused to accept a student giving up, or a performer capable of captivating a room of young children, the final stage before an offer involves a full day on campus coaching actual Alpha students. If that prospect is what excites you most, submit your application today.

What You Will Be Doing

• Facilitating one-hour life-skills workshops for K-8 groups covering public speaking, focus, feedback, and other essential skills, customizing the framework and creating new sessions when you identify a need
• Conducting daily individual and small-group motivation sessions that drive every student to 100% of their weekly app targets, leveraging Coachbot analytics, Alpha's reward structures (school currency, leaderboards), and your connection with each student to overcome obstacles
• Delivering the Test2Pass (Alpha's mastery assessment) for each life skill, and working with students who do not pass until mastery is achieved
• Adjusting your approach across a broad age spectrum, from kindergarteners requiring high energy and activity to 8th graders needing candid conversations and accountability
• Serving as the adult who maintains standards and the adult students choose to confide in; warmth builds the trust to challenge, and challenge demonstrates your confidence in their potential

What You Won’t Be Doing

• Delivering content at a whiteboard; academic instruction is embedded in the applications, not delivered by you
• Creating curriculum from the ground up; you execute an established framework with energy and narrative skill
• Overseeing students while they use computers; motivation in this context is hands-on, individual, and continuous
• Reducing a weekly target to allow a student to meet it; when a student falls behind, the solution is supporting the student, not adjusting the goal
• Evaluating homework, conducting standardized test preparation, or handling parent outreach; Campus Leads manage parent interaction, and the other tasks do not exist in this model

Youth Mentor Key Responsibilities

Drive every student in your K-8 group to complete their weekly learning targets, demonstrate mastery of each life skill, and finish the year reporting that they loved you.

Basic Requirements

• Available to work on-site at an Alpha campus in Denver, CO; Oklahoma City, OK; Tulsa, OK; Nashville, TN; Austin, TX; Brownsville, TX; Fort Worth, TX; Houston, TX (Central, South, or The Woodlands); Park City, UT; or Toronto, Canada (relocation assistance provided)
• Bachelor's degree in any discipline
• Minimum 3 years of direct experience working with K-8 students (classroom instruction, coaching, tutoring, camp counseling, or youth program management)
• A concrete example you can describe of motivating a K-8 student toward a challenging goal: the objective, your actions, and the result
• Comfort allowing AI to manage instructional delivery while you concentrate on motivation and life-skills development
• Daily use of generative AI tools (e.g., ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude)
• Authorization to work in the US without visa sponsorship (or in Canada for the Toronto location)

Nice-to-have Requirements

• Background in youth sports coaching, debate, camp leadership, theater, or after-school programming where you held direct responsibility for motivating children toward defined objectives
• Personal track record of high performance (academic, athletic, or professional), such that holding others to demanding standards is consistent behavior, not an adopted stance
• Narrative ability and presence sufficient to engage a room of 12-year-olds for an hour without escalating volume
• Demonstrated success converting disengaged or resistant students into engaged contributors

About Alpha

Want to join a learning rebellion that’s transforming the traditional classroom?

Alpha School is on a mission to reshape education with a bold approach that harnesses AI to accelerate learning and unleash student potential.

They don’t play by the old rules.

Alpha is creating a new paradigm where students master core academics in just two hours a day, freeing up time for hands-on, passion-driven learning that truly prepares them for the real world.

Alpha School is rewriting the rules of education.

Sounds too good to be true? It’s not.

There is so much to cover for this exciting role, and space here is limited. Hit the Apply button if you found this interesting and want to learn more. We look forward to meeting you!

Working with us

This is a full-time (40 hours per week), long-term position. The position is immediately available and requires entering into an independent contractor agreement with Crossover as a Contractor of Record. The compensation level for this role is $50 USD/hour, which equates to $100,000 USD/year assuming 40 hours per week and 50 weeks per year. The payment period is weekly. Consult for more details on this topic.

Crossover Job Code: LJ-4415-US-Pearland-YouthMentor.001