Online tutoring side income for working special education teachers

Two evenings a week. A real second income. No second school.

If you're already a licensed special education teacher in Tennessee or Florida, you have everything you need to earn $200 to $400 a week tutoring online. Two evenings of teaching, paid weekly as a W-2 employee, on top of your district paycheck. No grading. No prep. No new building. Just an hour at a time, from your couch.

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Founded 2014 44 special education tutors thousands of children served Built by parents of a child with autism

This is for the teacher who's tired of the fake choices.

Working teachers are sold one of two side hustles, and both are bad.

Choice one: tutor on a freelance marketplace like Outschool or Wyzant. The hourly rate looks great until you do the math. You're a 1099 contractor — no taxes withheld, you owe self-employment tax, you market yourself, you handle no-shows. The actual take-home is nothing like the headline rate.

Choice two: pick up after-school tutoring at your district. You stay in your building until 6:30 p.m. You teach kids you already taught all day. You're exhausted by Wednesday. The pay is fine but you're trading your evening recovery time for it.

This is choice three. Two evenings a week, from your house, with students who were matched to your specific strengths, paid as a W-2 employee. No marketing, no taxes to track, no extra building to drive to.

The pay math, plainly.

$24/hr × 6 hours/week × 52 weeks = $7,488/year of supplemental income. That's $144 a week.

$24/hr × 10 hours/week × 52 weeks = $12,480/year. That's $240 a week.

You're a W-2 employee, which means we withhold federal tax and FICA before you get paid. The number on your direct deposit is your number — no surprise tax bill in April. In Tennessee and Florida (no state income tax), more of your gross stays with you than in almost any other state.

How working teachers actually fit this in.

Every working teacher we hire negotiates this differently. Here are the three patterns we see most often.

The two-weeknight pattern

Most common.

You tutor Tuesday and Thursday from 5:00 to 6:30 p.m. — two students, 45 minutes each. You're home by dinner. About six hours a week. Roughly $144 a week, or $580 a month.

The Saturday morning pattern

Keep weeknights free.

You take your weeknights back. Saturday from 8:30 a.m. to noon, you tutor three or four sessions back-to-back, then you have the rest of the weekend.

The summer-heavy pattern

Max summer income.

During the school year you do one or two sessions a week. During summer, you ramp up to fifteen or twenty hours. Most of your tutoring income earned June through August.

"But will this burn me out?"

Honest answer: it depends on your school. If you're already running on fumes by 4 p.m. Tuesday because of caseload size and admin churn, two more hours of work that night may be the wrong call. We've had teachers try this for a semester and decide it wasn't sustainable, and we respected that.

But here's what teachers tell us most often: tutoring with us is the part of teaching that doesn't burn them out. It's why they got into the profession. One kid, one hour, no IEP meeting, no testing prep, no parent emails about the parking lot. They come home from school exhausted, log on, teach Maya for 45 minutes, and feel better at the end of the session than they did at the start.

That's real. We've heard it dozens of times. The part of teaching you love isn't what's draining you. It's everything else.

How this stacks against your district's after-school options.

Most school districts pay extra-duty hours at $25 to $35 an hour — slightly above what we pay, on paper. Then you account for: driving home from school after the tutoring ends, supervising kids in a hallway who don't want to be there, prepping materials yourself, no training on what to teach, often being the only adult in a building at 5:30. The hourly rate looks similar; the experience does not.

With us: log in from home, teach one child, log out. Same hourly rate, fundamentally different work.

Frequently asked questions from working teachers

Will my district care that I have a second job?
Almost never, but check your contract. Most teacher contracts have moonlighting policies that require disclosure of secondary employment. Tutoring online for a private company in the evenings is a normal teacher side gig, and most districts don't object.
How quickly can I start?
Two to three weeks. Background check, license verification, brief orientation, first session match. Faster if you apply now and slower if you apply during the week before school starts when our hiring queue is full.
Can I take time off during testing season or report cards?
Yes. Tell us in advance and we'll pause your sessions. Most working teachers take a week off in May (state testing) and a week in late January or June (report cards). We work around it.
Do I have to choose specific weeknights, or can I be flexible?
Most teachers pick specific times so families can plan. If you need to swap a Tuesday for a Wednesday occasionally, that's fine — give us 48 hours notice and we'll let the family know.
What grade levels and disabilities will I work with?
Whatever you tell us you're best at. If you've spent twelve years teaching K–2 reading to dyslexic kids, that's who we'll match you with. If you've worked across all grades and want variety, we can do that too.

Ready to make Tuesday and Thursday pay?

Five-minute chat or a slightly longer application — your choice. Either one starts the conversation.

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