In the library of Hiawatha Elementary School, students use crayons to connect points on a graph. They don’t know it yet, but they’re drawing a big pirate ship.
“We are pirating, not in the illegal way. We're pirating in the fun math way," jokes Lily Smith, the third-grade teacher running the activity. It’s part of their “Crazy Eights” after-school math program, where they’re trying to make math more fun.
They’re pirates learning about X & Y axes today. On Tuesday, they were cow farmers learning perimeter and area.
Illinois used federal COVID funding for a high-impact tutoring program. That funding expired in the fall. Hiawatha Elementary was part of the Illinois Tutoring Initiative from 2022 all the way through last summer.
“High-impact” means students meet multiple times per week in small groups of three or fewer and that it’s fully integrated with their classroom instruction.
Once the federal funding expired, Principal Caitlin Benes wanted to find a way to continue it, because she says they were seeing results.
“We were seeing students be able to not only grow on those benchmark assessments," said Benes, "but also on the like in-class, regular skills that they're learning at their grade level."
But there were two major obstacles to continuing it. One, they weren’t sure they could afford it. And two, they didn’t have the staff for it.
“I couldn't figure it out," she said. "So, all first semester we went back and forth. We settled with ‘we can't do it, but we also aren't okay with doing nothing.’”
That’s how they came to “Crazy Eights.” It may not be high-impact tutoring, but it’s something to help students stay engaged and make math less scary.
“If they're scared, they tend not to take academic risks, right?" said Benes. "If we're scared, we hold ourselves back."
Nancy Waymack is with the National Student Support Accelerator at Stanford University.
She’s the lead author of a new brief that analyzes tutoring efforts in every state.
“I would say," she said, "that the Illinois program is actually a little more structured and has more partnerships built in."
With states and individual districts weighing how to fund tutoring programs, Waymack says it’s important to make sure it’s still “high impact.” She says if it’s diluted to save money and students meet in larger groups or it happens less often, there will be less academic benefit.
“It's individualized instruction, and we know that is an effective approach for students," she said. "Teachers do it every time they go over to a student and help them along and make sure they know exactly what's happening in class.”
She says you shouldn’t think of tutoring as an add-on, but as something integral to the learning experience.
So far, Waymack says only one state, Tennessee, has made tutoring a permanent part of their education funding formula, but others are using grants. Illinois has yet to provide any grant or formula funding for tutoring.
Mike Balestri is the principal at Lincoln Elementary School in Oglesby.
They also participated in the Illinois Tutoring Initiative.
“We looked at it like a win-win situation for us," he said. "We'd be able to provide some tutoring support for really no cost to the district at that time.”
The program paid their own teachers to do the tutoring. It grew slowly at first, but by last year, they were tutoring 30 kids, which is a lot at a small, rural school.
Like Benes, Balestri says their program was paying dividends.
“We saw a lot of progress in our own district testing," he said. "Kids were getting up much closer to grade level. They would not have been able to make some of those gains without the program in place."
So, when the pandemic era money went away, just like at Hiawatha, he wanted the tutoring initiative to continue. But Balestri says they went to their superintendent and school board and were able to pull enough money together to keep it going.
“We needed to continue something," he said. "We had to make the investment as a district, so we have really continued to operate a very similar tutoring program this school year with kind of the same thought process."
In fact, they were able to expand it. The previous program was for third through fifth graders -- and now second-grades can get tutoring too.
Balestri hopes they can keep it up for as long as possible. Because even though the tutoring program initially came about to help students overcome pandemic-era learning gaps -- he says additional individualized instruction is always useful to have.
And, if the state could step in to help pay for it, this type of support wouldn’t be limited to just the schools who can afford it.
