TAMPA, Fla. — In the nearly three decades that Frank Shideler has been tutoring English to immigrants through the Hillsborough Literacy Council, he’s taught dozens of people from around the globe, in places like Ukraine, Russia, Colombia, Peru, Nepal and China.

“It’s been a marvelous program for me over the years, and it’s so much better than anything that I had ever hoped for,” he told Spectrum Bay News 9 this week from his home in South Tampa. “It’s not only that you feel like you’re giving people the tools to navigate into our system, but also I’ve found that we create a mutual friendship with almost everyone we have. It’s more than just students, you know. They become part of your family.”

Though he’s mostly been offering his lessons online since the pandemic, he makes an exception for Dongqing Li and Jiying Pang, a Chinese couple who moved to Tampa and have been working with Shideler for about five years now.

“We’re not just students. We are friends and actually family,” says Pang.

Shideler (who jokes that he’s “ageless” when asked his actual age) moved with his then-wife Joan to South Tampa from South Florida in 1993 after one of his two daughters married a Tampa resident. In 1994, he found his way to the Hillsborough Literacy Council and later become a board member and board president of the organization before formally stepping down in 2020.

Shideler said that he’s become even more engaged with tutoring after his wife passed away eight years ago, saying that it “filled the void.”

“You lose a loved one and you think, 'Well this is terribly hard to do,'" he says. But he came around to the conclusion that she was in a better place and that his feeling of loss was sort of selfish, a feeling that he could only remedy by becoming more generous with his time. “And as soon as that thought came to me, new students came in and it’s just wonderful how it works.”

There’s currently a waiting list of over 100 students looking to be tutored with the Hillsborough Literacy Council.

“One out of five people in Hillsborough County are non-native English speakers, and it’s estimated that less than 50% of them are proficient at English, so we definitely have a large number of people who are seeking an English education,” says Eric Hughes, the adult literacy coordinator for the Tampa/Hillsborough Public Library.

Hughes says that while the U.S. is considered a relatively literate society, there are about 300,000 people in Hillsborough County alone “who can read and write but they can’t really fill out job applications and maybe read medical labels and things like that.”

The council is always looking for volunteer tutors, and Hughes says that they don’t have to be trained professionals to take on the effort.

“We’ll take care of your training and give you those materials, so we have people from all walks of life,” Hughes says.

To sign up to be a volunteer English tutor with the Hillsborough Literacy Council, you can call them at (813) 273-3650 or email them at adultliteracy@hcflgov.net.