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Published Sunday, September 07, 2008 in Local

Free math tutoring fair Sept. 16 at Welch

By Brenda Pedraza-Vidamour

The Times-Herald

Welch Elementary School will hold another tutoring fair Sept. 16 for parents interested in free tutoring services for their children who struggled with math last year.

About a dozen state-approved tutoring providers will be on hand at 5:30 p.m. at the school on Mary Freeman Road before the PTA meeting starts. Parents are invited to select one of these providers based on what type of tutoring would best suit their child needs, advised Sherry Warren, Coweta Schools Title I coordinator.

Some of the tutoring programs are offered online by some of the "supplemental educational services" or SES providers which furnish the laptop and Internet service. Warren advises parents that online learning is better suited for students who are self-motivated.

Some of the other SES providers offer tutoring at the student's home while most offer their programs at a central location such as the school itself, a community center, a business or a church.

Warren explained the providers actually don't offer the tutoring, but contract for those services with teachers -- often those who already are employed by the Coweta school system.

The provider bills the school system for the hours, based on what type of services they offer to each student. No money exchanges hands between the parent, provider or tutor.

There are 44 providers approved to offer services within Coweta. But since the state requests them to serve more than one county, only about a dozen make themselves available in Coweta, Warren said. The costs that are billed to the school system range from $40 to $80 per hour, depending on the type of tutoring and the provider.

The school system offers parents a comparison sheet to help them make their choice, and points out that they get more tutoring hours with the $40-per-hour tutors, but Warren stresses to parents that the tutoring is "only as good as the tutor." Provider directories with information about the providers and summaries about their programs are also available on the Georgia Department of Education's Web site by county.

The school system has different pools of resources to pay for the tutoring services including the federal funding received at schools classified as Title I schools and money that the local school system sets aside for the non-Title I schools.

Title I schools -- schools with a high number of students receiving free/reduced meals -- receive the additional funding to provide additional instruction to improve the academic performance of low achieving and economically disadvantaged children. Two-thirds of Coweta's elementary schools, including Welch, are categorized as Title I or high poverty schools.

For Coweta's Title I schools, the money set aside for the tutoring amounts to 20 percent of the Title I budget or $500,000, Warren said. The school system is allowed to spend up to $1,145 per student. There are 340 students at Welch Elementary eligible for free/reduced meals and the tutoring services paid for by Title I monies.

About 47 parents came to Welch's first provider fair at last month's PTA, prompting the school system to coordinate another provider fair for Sept. 16 to get more parents to take advantage of the free tutoring.

"To me that's not a good turnout for that size school," Warren said.

Under Title I rules, Welch has to make space available for the low-income students first before opening the tutoring slots to other students who scored low on Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests (CRCT). The CRCTs are one of the factors that determine whether a school makes "adequate yearly progress" or AYP under the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation.

Starting Sept. 17, the slots at Welch not taken by low income students will be offered to other students at Welch who've requested assistance as long as there's funding available, Warren said.

Besides Welch, the Title I funding is available for the 340 eligible children at Evans Middle School, another school that didn't make AYP last school year. A little more than a dozen of the Evans Middle School parents of the targeted students attended Evans' first provider fair.

"That's about the way it's been every year I've done it," Warren said. "We just can't get them to understand that this could be a really good opportunity."

Warren said Welch teachers meanwhile have been clamoring to get the tutoring forms to parents and urging them to get their students in the sessions because the CRCTs, even in elementary school, are such high-stakes tests. The CRCTs for the eighth-graders enrolled in middle schools also determine promotion or retention to the next grade.

The Coweta school system averages about 80 tutoring requests from Evans each year. The response from Welch has been similar, but not necessarily from the low-income group of students Welch wants to target.

"We had a pretty big request from Welch. We've already received probably 60 applications from that school," Warren said.

The applications received so far are being held until after the Sept. 16 fair to allow for all low-income students to be served first. School systems categorize students as low income or economically disadvantaged by their eligibility for free or reduced meals.

"It's kind of a touchy situation because that information is not supposed to be public. But in order for them to be the first priority, we have to know that," she said.

About one third of Coweta's eighth-graders and one fourth of its fifth-graders failed the CRCTs in math and reading last school year resulting in 10 of Coweta's 27 schools failing to make AYP.

Welch was one of the 10 schools that did not make AYP for the 2007-2008 school year and prior years. This year it was because of low math CRCT pass rates for economically disadvantaged students. Because the school did not make AYP for consecutive years, however, it was also categorized as a "needs improvement" or NI school.

Under NCLB, it and other NI schools are required to offer school transfers or supplemental educational services, such as tutoring.

But Welch is also one of the six schools that is expected to make AYP after summer school re-tests are re-tabulated later this month. Students who initially failed the CRCTs took the tests again after summer school last June, but those tests scores weren't included in the original release of the schools' AYP status. The second release of the schools' AYP status is expected this month.

The tutoring option is something offered for the first time this year for Welch and other NI-1 schools because of a "differentiated accountability" agreement reached a few months ago between the U.S. Department of Education and the Georgia DOE.

Under NCLB, when a school fails to meet AYP for two consecutive years, it's classified as a "needs improvement" or NI school. There are different NI levels depending on how many consecutive years the school has failed to meet AYP. In addition, there are different consequences for each consecutive year on the NI list.

Under the agreement, Georgia schools that failed to meet AYP for three consecutive years must now offer free tutoring in addition to the original choice of transferring to another public school.