Grant will restart after-school, summer tutoring programs in Clairton
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Gov. Tom Corbett may not have thought the after-school and summer tutoring program operated by the Clairton City School District for students performing under grade level was important when he cut the funds that supported it in his 2011 budget and maintained that cut in his 2012 budget proposal Tuesday.
But representatives for the Heinz Endowments who toured Clairton schools last month and reviewed the progress students made during the years of the program decided it was significant enough to provide a $50,000 Equity in Education grant.
"I explained that we had run a tutoring program for 10 years and had success for the last five, making AYP for the last four years," said Clairton assistant superintendent Elisabeth Ehrlich.
Ms. Ehrlich was referring to the fact that Clairton students met the targets for Adequate Yearly Progress on the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment exams.
The Heinz funding will be used to restart the after-school program as soon as tutors can be hired and to operate a summer program in June. From 2002-2003 until the current school year, the district -- like a number of poor districts across the state-- operated the program with state grant funding. During that time there was a marked improvement in students academic achievement in Clairton.
"The program has been working really well. People are getting good at delivering this program and if it wasn't for the abysmal cuts, it would have continued to do good work," said Doug Root, a spokesman for the endowments.
"They have implemented a process for identifying students in need of special intervention in reading and math. For some of these students ... the time required to reach proficiency goals is quite considerable."
Melanie Brown, education program officer for the endowments, said the program supported by the grant money is especially important for students in grades 7-12.
Ms. Brown said district officials had reached out to the Heinz Endowments last summer, which would have been after the final state budget was approved and the tutoring funding officially lost.
Officials from the endowment toured the school in early January and learned about the history of the tutoring program and its apparent success. After that visit, the Heinz officials invited the district to apply for funding and the grant was awarded before the end of the month.
Ms. Ehrlich said there is a sense of urgency in restarting the program as students will take the annual PSSA exams next month. That means they will likely get a month or so of tutoring before the exams when they normally would have had tutoring since the beginning of the school year.
"But we are always doing everything we can for them all day every day so we are still hoping for the best," Ms. Ehrlich said.
Ms. Brown said officials from her organization will continue to spend time in the district and will consider future funding for the program beyond June.
The grant to Clairton is the first such significant grant to an Allegheny County School District outside of the Pittsburgh Public Schools, where the Heinz Endowments have made considerable contributions, Ms. Brown said.
In addition to the $50,000 grant for tutoring, which was designated specifically for Clairton, the district was also among a group of districts to receive a teacher empowerment grant of $15,000, also from Heinz Endowments.
That funding will be used "to create a more personalized secondary education framework to improve student achievement," Ms. Brown said.
"The idea is that the young person has an adult in the building who is someone who can help them," Ms. Brown said.
Ms. Ehrlich said the district has already embarked on a program to assign each student in grades 7-12 to an adult mentor on the staff,
When she heard about the availability of the grant money, she submitted the program for consideration. Under the guidelines, districts that met a certain threshold for the number of students qualifying for free and reduced lunches could apply for up to $15,000 and Clairton was awarded the full amount.
Ms. Ehrlich said the district got the idea for the program by working with student leaders and that all students in grades 7-12 have been placed into groups that are assigned an adult staff member as their mentor.
Two Wednesdays a month, each academic period is shortened by three minutes in order to create an extra period during which the mentors and students interact.
During those periods students will be encouraged to discuss their plans for the future and as part of the program, professionals and alumni will be brought in to talk about careers and their paths to success in adulthood.
"These are people who can say 'I've been in your shoes,' " Ms. Ehrlich said.
Also as part of this project, which will be launched Tuesday, students will make video podcasts in which they explain their future plans and how academic success feeds into them, Ms. Ehrlich said.
Those video clips will be played in the school lobby during activities and special events.
First Published February 9, 2012 12:00 am
