Beyond the ESSER “Funding Cliff”: Local Supports to Sustain High-Impact Tutoring

In this GLR Learning Tuesdays webinar, we picked up on Part 2 in our series co-sponsored by Overdeck Family Foundation exploring high-impact tutoring as a critical, evidence-based strategy proven to accelerate academic learning post-pandemic. Discussions that constituted Beyond the ESSER “Funding Cliff”: Local Supports to Sustain High-Impact Tutoring gave us the chance to explore the path to sustainable expanded local tutoring programs well beyond the 2024 ESSER spending deadline. Aside from the obvious need to fund the programs, our expert panelists discussed the essential role of parents and caregivers in advocating for programs impacting their children and even fulfilling the tutoring role. Sharon Contreras, Ph.D., CEO of the Innovation Project and former Superintendent of Guilford County Schools in North Carolina, shared how parents supported the success and sustainability of their broad-based tutoring initiative:

Parents were very pleased, for the most part with the tutoring, and they became the biggest advocates for helping us in terms of recruiting other parents who might be hard to find, difficult to reach, to say ‘Hey, your child can benefit from this tutoring. All you have to do is sign up here.’ They also helped us to recruit tutors at their places of employment, and many of the parents became tutors themselves. And I just think sometimes we underestimate the knowledge, skill and power that the parents have to actually catapult our programs to the next level in public schools.

Moderator Pete Lavorini of Overdeck Family Foundation engaged Contreras in an informative discussion with Horace Buddoo of Saga Education, along with school system and tutor program partners, Nick Erber of UpLift Education, a broad network of charter schools in Texas, and Mindy Sjoblom of OnYourMark. These tutoring experts further unpacked elements of school system tutoring partnerships that lead to successful implementation and significant results on student achievement. Erber shared impressive data showing the clear difference that OnYourMark made for his students and explained how important this information is for generating buy-in from decision-makers to invest in the program for years to come. Erber shared additional key components that led to their successful partnership with OnYourMark’s tutoring program, providing insights for all tutoring programs interested in partnering with school districts:

Any successful partnership has to start with aligned values. It was clear OnYourMark understood what it took to provide high-quality instruction to scholars, and tutors were seasoned pros at working in schools from the core values alignment standpoint. It really is a matter of understanding what works for the school schedule, for getting kids logged-on [and connected with tutors] and for getting admin and teacher buy in. OnYourMark was realistic about the timeline and realistic about how much planning is involved to achieve our very specific goal of getting our K–2 students reading at grade level four times a week.