Education Station on track to bring tutoring services to Bluff Park

Tara Bennett, a longtime Hoover educator, has an idea for the community — and her brother, Don Bennett, thinks it’s just the ticket.

Just behind the new gift shop and coffeehouse he’s opening in Bluff Park, she’s going to have a little schoolhouse offering top-notch tutoring services.

It’ll be just behind the caboose at On a Shoestring.

And it’ll be called Education Station.

“My nephew came up with the name — we thought a train theme would be great with the caboose right there next to it,” Tara Bennett said, who has 30 years of teaching experience, a doctorate in education and a master’s in school counseling.

Her nephew is one who has benefited from her tutoring. When she was working on her dissertation, she used the testing that she was researching to identify his learning style, and then his dad, Don Bennett, implemented it in how they approached his studies.

“Tara’s Ph.D. explored and documented some 16 specialized learning styles of students. As her brother, I was able to use this information to understand how my own kids learned individually and was able to give them every opportunity to succeed educationally,” Don Bennett said. 

He said he saw the value of that strategy. So when he had a spare building on the property where he was opening a coffee shop, adding a tutoring center to spread that help to the masses made sense.

“Tara now brings this advantage to children and parents in the greater Birmingham area through Education Station,” he said, noting that the design of the building would be fun for students, too. The little building will have a train running around the outside edge, as well as a train theme on the inside implemented into its tables and computer stations.

Tara Bennett agreed with her brother that Education Station would be something good for Bluff Park.

“Opening the tutoring and testing center seemed like a good opportunity to start something on my own,” she said, noting she still does contract work for local schools.

At Education Station, she hopes to tutor students but also provide a variety of other services. One of those is the Murphy-Meisgeier Type Indicator for Children, a test like the well-known Myers-Briggs Type Indicator but geared toward helping children find out their learning style preferences.

“It’s really just a fantastic tool, and it helps teach students their strengths and weaknesses and how to work with those,” she said. “The test is broken down into three levels — elementary, middle school and high school — and teaches them about their type and what they can do.”

Also formerly a special education coordinator, Tara Bennett can test students to see if they need special education services.

She started her career as a special education teacher in Midfield, then a school counselor in Homewood and assistant principal in Helena before moving to Hoover as an administrator.

She also serves as an adjunct professor at Birmingham-Southern College, teaching courses to education majors.

For more information, contact Tara Bennett at 310-2262.