Jennifer Shemtob has built an impressive tutoring business in the Philadelphia area, with her company Teacher Time To Go boasting a roster of 120 tutors that help instruct the children of somewhere between 500 and 600 families. For Shemtob, the goal isn’t to create a nationally franchised tutoring service; it’s to provide the best tutoring possible to kids in the region. That’s because she’s a teacher first and a businesswoman second.
While she mainly directs the company as it grows, she still finds time to do what got her to fall in love with this business in the first place: teach.
“I have probably between five clients I teach a week, and I run all of our parent seminars and our student executive functioning workshops. So I do get the best of both worlds, where I’m still working with kids, because I feel like it’s really important to stay knowledgeable,” she said. “As the owner of the company, I want to be aware firsthand of how kids are getting instruction in school.”
Shemtob, a resident of Blue Bell and a member of Congregation Beth Or in Maple Glen, started Teacher Time To Go in 2019 after spending nearly a decade as a teacher in the Philadelphia and Lower Merion school districts. She said that that time in the classroom taught her that every student learns differently and that each student benefits from individualized instruction.
“My favorite part of the day growing up was always when I got one-on-one support with the teacher, so one of my big values when I was teaching was to try to spend as much one-on-one time with the kids as I could,” Shemtob said.
For around a year, Shemtob both taught in Lower Merion and ran Teacher Time To Go before realizing that she would have to choose one.
“I was tutoring after school and on the weekends and during summers, just by myself. It got to the point where there just wasn’t enough time in the day. I was like, ‘How can I help these families and provide the most effective and efficient support?’”
It was a leap of faith to leave the steady life of a teacher in a great school district, but when Shemtob resigned from Lower Merion in 2020, she was confident in the direction of Teacher Time To Go. The business quickly gained even more momentum, and today it offers individualized tutoring in the form of homework help, test prep, enrichment services, special education support, executive functioning and organizational skills.
Executive functioning is a key element of the approach that Teacher Time To Go takes, Shemtob explained. She said that, often, the biggest hurdle for kids to get over in their academic careers is confidence.
“All of our teachers are trained to instill that idea of feeling good about yourself. A lot of what we do is [focus on] executive functioning, which is best understood as the skills we need every day to be successful in life,” she said. “We do a lot of planning and prioritizing and goal setting, organization, time management, task initiation and self-regulation. These are skills that aren’t taught in class. There’s no course for it, but kids are still expected and kind of required to understand and utilize these skills.”
Through it all, Shemtob has been able to gain a reputation for quality teaching and a business model that meets students where they are — literally and figuratively.
“We want to make this as easy as possible for families and kids to receive the support in an environment where they’re the most comfortable, so we go to family’s houses or local libraries or coffee shops,” she said.
No matter how many students come to Teacher Time To Go, Shemtob said that she wants to maintain its areas of focus as Montgomery County, Delaware County, Bucks County, Chester County, Philadelphia and South Jersey. She said that getting too big would mean that Teacher Time To Go would lose its personal touch. Every family that uses its services has her personal cell phone number, and she interviews every new tutor who joins the team.
For Shemtob, putting so much effort into Teacher Time To Go isn’t easy. She is currently about 36 weeks pregnant, but she said that she learned the value of two hardworking parents from her own mom and dad. Both of them were successful in their professional pursuits and still managed to raise her at the same time. Shemtob stressed that she has nothing but respect for stay-at-home parents, but that for her and her family, a different model works better.
“What works best for our family is working our butts off during the day, and I feel like I have two amazing jobs — running my tutoring company and then getting to spend time with my two-year-old and our anticipated son that will be here next month,” she said.
