 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
District Focuses on Supplemental Services "The NCLB team is coming on Monday ... at 9:00 AM to sign up parents for tutoring services ... We are not sure how many parents will come during this block of time, so our desire is to be customer friendly and to meet with each parent as quickly as possible ... Thank you for your team spirit." This notice was sent to teachers in the Toledo Public School System. With customer service in mind, the Toledo Public School System implements, and diligently informs parents about, supplemental educational services (SES). Supplemental educational services are free tutoring or other extra academic help offered to students in Title I schools that are in need of improvement; are offered in reading, math, or other core subjects; and are provided before or after school, on weekends, or in the summer. Designed to aid in closing the significant academic achievement gap between lower-income and more advantaged students, supplemental services are a key element of No Child Left Behind. Beginning in 2000, Toledo Public Schools made supplemental educational services available to the district's lowest-performing students, who were clustered in schools that serve the largest concentrations of high-poverty pupils. When NCLB passed in 2002, most district leaders saw the law's goals converge with their own reform efforts, so it is no coincidence that Toledo's current SES mission so closely reflects the goals outlined in No Child Left Behind. Toledo used the NCLB provisions to craft solutions about where to locate supplemental educational services, how to staff them, and how to incorporate them into the school district's operations before Toledo even received official notification from the state to move ahead with the program. As the SES endeavor grew to be more complex, the district appointed a full-time No Child Left Behind facilitator to aid in the unique challenges that come with implementing such programs in multi-ethnic, multi-income school systems. Since the ultimate goal of supplemental services is to improve student performance, district leaders also developed a "Supplemental Educational Services Agreement," identifying what the providers and the district will do to meet this goal. The agreement includes standard learning objectives, timelines, and performance measures to keep parents, the school district, and the state informed of student progress. Creative, comprehensive program objectives on a school district's part, however, do not always translate into high parent involvement or student enrollment. In the first year that Toledo public schools offered supplemental services, only 30 of 1,500 eligible families responded to the initial invitation. This low response led Toledo district leaders to realize that they had to make parents and students aware of the positive effects that supplemental services can have. Otherwise, few would respond to such an opportunity. As Secretary of Education Rod Paige has warned, "This opportunity is like the proverbial tree falling in the forest—if no one hears about it, it's nothing but a missed opportunity." Since Toledo's past attendance records at parent-teacher conferences were quite high, Toledo's NCLB facilitator proposed that her staff prepare individually addressed classroom packets to be distributed by teachers to parents during the conferences. This way, teachers could explain how supplemental services benefit students, and they could encourage parents to register their students. Additionally, the packets were available in English and Spanish, so that even if there were a language barrier between parent and teacher, the parent could still learn about the programs. With participation numbers increasing from 96 students in 2000 to 500 in the next school year, Toledo Public Schools and the supplemental educational services staff agree that this school-based marketing is essential to the success of the program. Note: The Toledo Public School Systems' supplemental educational services program is one of the case studies in the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Innovation and Improvement's publication, Innovations in Education: Creating Strong Supplemental Educational Services Programs. This report was produced for the U.S. Department of Education by WestEd. Related Event: Creating Strong Supplemental Educational Services Programs
Permission to Use Resources SchoolsMovingUp, a WestEd initiative, invites you to use our resources in your work. For uses that involve reproduction of more than one copy of the resource, please submit the online permission request form. We will reply immediately once we know your intended reproduction needs. All reproductions of the resource must include a full citation of the WestEd copyright. |
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
