My name is Scott Spizer and I am the founder and CEO of Origins Tutoring.

I grew up in Manhattan and attended Hunter College Elementary School and Dalton High School. From there, I went on to Yale University, where I played on the baseball and football teams and graduated with a degree in political science. After graduating, I spent the next decade on two distinct career paths – television journalism, at ABC News, and the restaurant industry, including being an original partner in Carmine’s, on the upper west side of Manhattan. Neither of these worlds ever fully fit me; they never felt like my “destiny”, or the way I was supposed to leave my mark. I was told several times I was “too nice” for the somewhat cutthroat industries I had chosen. Ultimately, I decided that it wasn’t me that needed changing, it was my vocation.

In 1995, I relocated to northern Virginia, where I spent two years in the Shenandoah Mountains building a cabin and writing children’s stories. After my years in the woods, the next step became clear: I would pursue my life-long interest in teaching. In high school, I had tutored younger students and been a counselor on weekends; in college, I worked with inner-city boys in the Yale/New Haven Big Brother program; throughout my adult life, I coached little-league baseball and volunteered as a math and English tutor. Working with young people was consistently “the other” thing I had done over the years; I realized that this “other” thing should be “the” thing.

Thankfully, my private tutoring practice grew quickly and thrived through word-of-mouth referrals and recommendations from schools and parents. As a Hunter and Dalton graduate, I had a first-hand understanding of the challenging academic and social worlds New York City students and their families faced. Over the next dozen years, I worked with hundreds of students from private and public schools in NYC and boarding schools in the surrounding area.

Origins was created in 2010. This is the company that I want to do business with as a parent of two children. I believe that dedication to creating choices – that is, creating opportunities for others to enhance their skills and, thereby, increase the number and quality of choices they have in life – makes a difference in the lives of the tutors, students and families with whom I work. I seek out dedicated and gifted tutors who can be positive role models. My tutors need to have both the intellect and the empathy to provide the support a student needs. Likewise, I seek out families who are committed to helping their child develop skills that will serve them for life. I build long-term relationships both with my tutors and the families that work with Origins.

Although I primarily work from my office on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, my years in the woods live on – in a “cabin dressed as a house” in Pawling, a small town on the southern tip of Dutchess County, where I also work with students at Trinity-Pawling boarding school.