$3M Reading, Math Tutoring Plan Pitched

The Elicker Administration is looking to spend $3 million in federal aid to build out a new math and literacy tutoring program designed to help up to 1,500 public school students catch up on lost learning during the pandemic.

That proposal is included as a communication on the agenda for Monday’s full Board of Alders meeting. Mayor Justin Elicker also detailed that plan at a City Hall press conference Monday afternoon alongside New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) Supt. Iline Tracey, Asst. Supt. Keisha Redd-Hannans, and representatives from nonprofit afterschool programs like New Haven Reads, LEAP, Inspired Communities, and the Boys & Girls Club of Greater New Haven.

According to the legislative submission and a Dec. 12 letter written by city Chief of Staff Sean Matteson, the Elicker Administration wants to spend $3 million of federal American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds ​“to provide literacy and math tutoring to New Haven public school students.”

“Locally, last year only 16% of New Haven 3rd graders were at grade level in reading,” Matteson wrote to the alders in support of the spending plan. ​“That’s about 1 in 6 third graders reading at grade level. To change this downward direction will require interventions within the schools, support for New Haven families, and engaging the City’s communities.” 

The stakes of such learning loss, he added, are high. ​“Long-term studies have found that students who were not proficient in reading by the end of third grade were around four times more likely to be high school drop-outs than proficient readers. In fact, 88 percent of students who failed to earn a high school diploma were struggling readers in third grade.”

To help address this city-wide issue, Matteson continued, the city plans to issue a request for proposals (RFP) ​“to partner with an organization, or organizations, to create a robust, common-sense literacy and math tutoring program aimed at New Haven students from grade levels 1 through 5.”

To quote directly from Matteson’s letter, ​“ideally” such a program would:

• Start in early 2023 and run through the summer of 2025;

• Develop broad engagement of diverse partners within the city’s communities;

• Recruit and hire organizational staff; paid interns, high school and college students; and volunteer tutors to reach capacity to serve between 1,000 to 1,500 students from grades 1 through 5;

• Identify and implement evidence-based curricula which could be used in the tutoring program by individuals that are not classroom teachers or those that do not have an academic background in pedagogy;

• Provide training for staff and tutors for any participating organization through in-person training, written materials and videos while investing in a train-the-trainers approach to allow each organization to train their own staff and volunteers.

• Continue tutoring after the end of the NHPS academic year throughout summer, and work in concert with YARD, NHPS summer camps and other organizations providing summer enrichment activities;

• Plan and host Family Literacy Nights that provide coaching for families around literacy strategies; practice with kids; and fun, relationship-building activities; and

• Develop and implement technologies to further literacy in the home and ensuring age-appropriate reading material is available in the home for families.

The proposal now heads to an aldermanic committee for a public hearing before getting a final vote by the full Board of Alders.

The $3 million reading and math tutoring plan comes as the alders have already signed off on spending $53 million in ARPA aid on a mix of housing, vocational technical education, youth engagement, business support, and climate resiliency initiatives, and an additional $43 million on everything from police department surveillance cameras to expanded youth employment programs to a new Department of Community Resilience to budget mitigation efforts for funds lost during the height of the pandemic. The alders are also currently considering a $4.5 million ARPA proposal to buy gas-guzzling police SUVs and new fire trucks, and to fund fire hydrant repairs.

The proposal against the backdrop of deep concerns about chronic absenteeism, low reading and math scores, and a district-wide teacher shortage in the New Haven Public Schools.

Elicker fleshed out some of the details of the proposal during Monday afternoon’s press conference on the second floor of City Hall.

He said that the program should start early in 2023 with roughly 300 students, and then scale up over the next two and a half years to get to 1,500 students by the summer of 2025.

The first 300 kids will spent at least two hours per week receiving one-on-one reading and math tutoring while attending afterschool programs that they are currently enrolled in. ​“They’d be pulled out of the program twice a week to have a volunteer or some paid person give more intensive training,” the mayor said.

If the proposal is approved by the Board of Alders, he said, the city would put out an RFP for a ​“lead organization to coordinate the volunteer and curriculum” parts of this program. Much of their work will involve ​“engaging a lot of volunteers. It takes a lot of management,” he said. He added that the city is intends to ​“have conversations with large employers in the city” to see if they can help ​“drive an increase in the number of volunteers.”

“The work of education requires all hands on deck,” Tracey said during the presser. She described young students’ struggles with reading and math as ​“a national problem. The school alone cannot do this work. It takes the effort of everyone” to help students catch up.

“This will extend the support that our students need desperately,” added Redd-Hannans.

New Haven Reads Executive Director Kirsten Levinsohn described the proposal as having been put together to ​“match the unprecedented challenges that the kids are facing right now. Teachers in New Haven are doing an amazing job, but as we’ve heard, they can’t do it by themselves. I think it’s an especially innovative way to support the kids, to bring the youth organizations that are already working with so many kids together.”

Don't Forget About Teachers, Librarians

In response to Elicker’s press conference, city teachers union President Leslie Blatteau sent out an email press release emphasizing the need to prioritize investing in teachers and paraprofessionals to promote smaller class sizes, a full-time library media specialist in every school, increased support for English Language Learner students, and caps on caseloads for public school educators.

“We applaud the mayor for addressing the critical issue of literacy, and we recognize that nonprofit agencies can play a role to meet the needs of the whole child,” Blatteau is quoted as saying in that press release.

“However, the Mayor’s plan does not include the proven literacy and math solutions that classroom educators and support staff know firsthand our students need.”

Blatteau stressed those same points in a Monday afternoon phone interview with the Independent. ​“While I believe in community partnerships, I also believe that we need to trust our certified teachers and our paraprofessionals and we need to invest in the schools.”

Lauren Anderson, who chairs the public library’s board of directors, hit upon a similar point as Blatteau in the need to invest in existing public institutions that already have literacy teaching and tutoring at their core — with one such institution being New Haven’s public library system.

“I do appreciate citywide attention to literacy, and I also agree that if we don’t have an open and fully functional school library with a full-time library media specialist and if we don’t have public library branches that are fully staffed in ways that compensate staff adequately for the amazing work that they do on behalf of literacy, then we are missing some fundamental, foundational pieces of what a citywide literacy program needs to have in place.”