Education Week - January 18, 2023 - 8

Making Time for Academic Recovery
In the School Day: Ideas From 3 Principals
Creative uses of lunch hours, advisory
periods, and after-school time can help
students regain ground
By Denisa R. Superville
Schools are still figuring out how to
add time for academic recovery during
and after the regular school day to help
students catch up from the upheaval of
pandemic-era schooling.
It's not always easy, given the constraints
of the school day schedule and
the logistics of staffing, not to mention
the barrage of vendors offering their
recovery services and products. Many
principals are in uncharted territory
and are most likely defaulting to the
traditional ways of doing things-and
that's likely limiting access to accelerated
learning and other academic
recovery, according to Sarah Woulfin,
a professor in the department of educational
leadership at the University of
Texas, Austin.
" Leaders have more agency than it
looks like on paper, and yet we're still
not seeing those leaders making leaps
into action and shifting things around
in their schedules and in their use of
time, " Woulfin said.
Providing effective learning recovery
also requires a mix of instructional
and managerial leadership-whether
it's adding a new tutoring program or
adjusting the pacing of the curriculum-and
some of it is brand new terrain
for principals.
" There isn't a roadmap for it, "
Woulfin said. " [School leaders]
haven't been in this scenario before
to figure how would we shift the 7th
grade curriculum to accelerate in a
certain way, or what are the tradeoffs
of pulling kids from certain classes to
do math tutoring in certain grade levels,
or how do we ensure that the right
kids sign up for online tutoring that restores
equitable outcomes-because
certain things could even end up getting
exacerbated through these tutoring
or accelerated learning efforts. "
And despite millions of dollars from
the Elementary and Secondary School
Emergency Relief Fund (or ESSER) still
available to spend in districts, school
systems have not always given local
principals the flexibility to create tailormade
programs that would work for
their specific schools and communities.
But some districts and principals
have found ways to carve out dedicated
time on school days to help students
recoup learning-or keep them
from falling further behind. Here are
ideas from three of them.
Paying for transportation
Larry Haynes, the principal of Oak
Mountain Middle School in Shelby
County, Ala., got a $7,500 state grant to
overcome a frequent roadblock to tacking
academic recovery programs at the
end of the school day: transportation.
The grant allowed Haynes to cover
a stipend for the school bus driver to
pick up students attending a 90-minute
after-school tutoring program
and pay two teachers to help students
meet state math and English/language
arts standards.
Academic gaps existed before the
pandemic, but they widened during
the pandemic as the number of
home-schooled students ballooned
and the level of attention and support
students received at home varied,
Haynes said.
Finding time during the school day
can be a struggle, Haynes said, with
leaders having to weigh whether to
remove students from lunch, physical
education, or other classes to get extra
academic support in core subjects.
The school first expanded its advisory
period from 30 to 55 minutes to
help students focus more on standards
recovery in math and reading. Subjectarea
teachers work with students in the
areas in which they need help.
The school later added the 90-minute
after-school tutoring program,
with 45 minutes devoted to math support
and 45 minutes for reading and
English/language arts.
The three-day-a-week program is
offered to students who test below
their grade level on an i-Ready diagnostic
or the state assessment. Attendance
varies, from eight or nine students
per session to 30, Haynes said.
Getting young learners up
to speed
In Gray Court, S.C., Principal Farrell
C. Thomas used federal COVID relief
money to target academic recovery.
While leading Waterloo Elementary
School, a K-5 school, Thomas set
up a grade-level-based after-school
tutoring program for students. Over
six-week periods, students identified
as needing help attended the twicea-week
program heavily focused on
phonics and reading. It was staffed by
teachers in the school.
Early-childhood education is not
mandatory in South Carolina, so students
have always entered schools
with different levels of preparedness,
Thomas said. But the pandemic exacerbated
the learning gaps among the
youngest students, who had to start
their K-12 journey online.
The program was small, with no
more than 10 or more students per
grade and two grade-level teachers
per grade. The goal was to keep the
program as close to a one-to-one ratio
as possible as students worked toward
strengthening or developing critical
skills, Thomas said.
8 | EDUCATION WEEK | January 18, 2023 | www.edweek.org
Now a prinicipal at a middle school,
Thomas set up a similar 90-minute
tutoring session targeted at older students
who consistently scored below
the 20th percentile on assessments.
A student struggling in 6th grade
math, for example, would be referred
to the program by their teacher, while
the school's instructional coach
reaches out to the child's parents to
inform them that their child has been
identified as needing additional help.
Assistance is offered primarily in
math and English.
Teachers keep track of the student's
progress on assignments and assessments.
While the program is six weeks
long, some students stay longer.
Haynes said he'd increase the number
of days students can get help if he
had more money to do so.
When the program first started in
the 2020-21 school year, teachers
received $60 an hour to participate.
Now it's about $20-not enough to
entice a lot of teachers who are already
overworked, Thomas said.
" Teachers are burnt out, " he said. " If
I had multiple teachers who wanted
to do it, Monday through Thursday,
we would to it. But we can't get them.
Some are reluctant. Some say one day.
So you don't have the continuity of the
kid having the same person. "
School leaders and teachers don't
necessarily have to tack on additional
programs in the school day to help
students regain the ground they've
lost, Thomas said. Good teaching
practices-along with professionaldevelopment
support for teachers
on how to help students who are behind-can
go a long way.
Principal Mary Fulp used a $20,000
allocation from the MatanuskaSusitna
Borough school district in
Palmer, Alaska, to set up a 45-minute
lunchtime academic support program
for students who had been flagged as
needing assistance.
The district developed an earlywarning
system, where teachers reported
grades and other evidence of
student progress on days following
a graded assignment. That allowed
principals to develop just-in-time
academic assistance for students to
help them complete assignments and
move from incomplete grades to C
grades or higher.
A color-coded system indicated to
principals, like Fulp, who led Colony
Middle School last year, which students
should be flagged for extra help.
A student coded red, with a grade of
D or below, for example, was pulled
aside for the lunchtime support.
" We made it a very positive thing
as much as possible because we
knew that they are losing valuable
social time, " Fulp said. " We knew
it was working when kids started to
choose it. "
Scaling up a lunchtime program
The school-family relationship was
part of what made the program successful,
Fulp said.
School officials sent a message to
parents on Fridays letting them know
that their child needed to earn a C or
higher in a class and that they could
get extra help in the lunchtime program.
School officials also gave parents
other academic support options,
including online tutoring, that they
could use at home to help their children,
Fulp said.
Students also played a huge role.
They sent a weekly Friday email to
their parents about their goals for the
week, what they'd accomplished, and
their plans to address any issues with
their grades.
" Everyone had a different need, "
Fulp said. " It was almost like every
student was on an individualized
learning plan in order to help them
move forward. They were all at different
places with hardships, and learning,
and mental health concerns that
led to where they were. "
The lunchroom program was staffed
by one person, but other teachers gave
up their lunch period to pitch in. Teachers
got a $175 honorarium when the
number of hours they devoted to the
program reached the equivalent of a
full day's worth of work.
Lindsay Jack, the librarian at Colony
Middle School, who oversaw the program,
said it was successful, helping
students finish, on average, about four
missing assignments they would not
have otherwise completed.
But there were drawbacks. The first
was that only a few students were able
to attend- about 60 students, or 20
or so per grade level, Fulp said. The
teachers staffing the program were
not always experts in the areas where
students were struggling. And with 10
minutes devoted to lunch, students
had only about half an hour to work
with the teacher and complete their
assignments, she said.
The school took all of that to heart
and improved the program this year,
increasing the amount of time students
spend with a teacher and ensuring
that that time is spent with the
subject expert in the area in which the
students were struggling.
In the new iteration, students spend
55 minutes during designated " focus "
time with the teacher. (That means
that a child who is having trouble in
multiple subjects could potentially
get an additional 55 minutes a week
of academic support in each subject.)
Jack monitors the grades of the students
who had been recommended
to the program. The school has also
started an after-school math tutoring
program for students who need extra
help, Jack said.
Natalya Kanishcheva/iStock/Getty
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Education Week - January 18, 2023

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