High-impact tutoring, funded by Illinois pandemic aid, helps boost students’ scores and confidence

Four days a week, Darlene Allen-Nichols carves time out of her day job to help third graders with reading and math at Burnham Elementary School.

“The tutoring fits in with my purpose,” Allen-Nichols said. “It’s so important to first get to know the kids, develop rapport and make sure they trust me. We do a lot of games that will produce connectivity so that they will trust what I’m teaching them before we even start.”

Allen-Nichols is one of several hundred tutors providing individual or small-group, high-impact tutoring to students across the state as part of the Illinois Tutoring Initiative in collaboration with higher education institutions and school districts.

The Illinois State Board of Education is using federal COVID-19 relief funds to match about 1,900 students with about 700 tutors in 59 school districts throughout the state.

Christy Borders, director of the Illinois Tutoring Initiative who runs the program out of Illinois State University in Normal, said the central office at ISU creates the systems and infrastructure for the program and develops the training for tutors. And the regional offices work with specific districts to recruit, hire and supervise the tutors.

At Burnham Elementary School, in the village of Burnham, just south of Chicago, Allen-Nichols tutors two students right after school from 3 to 4 p.m. Monday through Thursday, working around her counseling schedule at DAN Care Center on 118th Street and Western Avenue in Chicago’s Beverly neighborhood. Her center provides counseling services, educational programming and consulting for families, women, children and young adults.

When she walks into the classroom, Allen-Nichols starts “soft,” asking her students about their day, what they learned and what they came across. “And then we get into, ‘OK, we’re going to do some math.’ And I start gauging what they learned that day and what still needs work,” she said.

One of Allen-Nichols’ students recently received the highest math grade she’s gotten all school year. Allen-Nichols said the girl’s teacher excitedly came by to share the accomplishment.

“That was a huge boost of energy for me — a shot in the arm,” Allen-Nichols said.

According to the Illinois Report Card, 47% of students at Burnham did not achieve performance level, or grade level, math during the 2021-22 school year, a trend seen statewide.

In Donovan, about 90 miles south of Chicago, Community Unit District 3 Superintendent Tony Coates said the district saw improvement in math scores as early as six months into the tutoring program.

“It’s made a huge impact,” he said. “Every elementary student receiving tutoring in math has shown math growth from fall to winter. That’s the name of the game — to get kids to catch up from some of the learning loss that occurred during the pandemic.”

Ahead of the 2022-23 school year, only 34% of students in the Donovan district met performance-level math criteria in the Illinois Assessment of Readiness, according to report card data. Test scores across the elementary, junior high and high school levels are anticipated to improve in math, Coates said.

Borders said high-impact tutoring allows kids in small groups to get much-needed extra time to sharpen skills in a subject area, but it’s hard to say how quickly a program like this can fill in the gaps.

And there is a key caveat: The tutoring initiative was designed specifically for schools that were under-resourced or schools that were disproportionately affected by COVID-19. ITI looked at the percentage of low-income students, among other things, to determine which districts qualified for the program.

“All students in all districts across the country and Illinois were impacted by COVID, there’s no question about that,” Borders said. “But I think what is really important to convey is that it was intentionally targeted to those who couldn’t put something in place on their own to help curb pandemic learning loss through something like high-impact tutoring.”

Borders said critics often get “too concerned about the numbers,” and that the 1,900 students within the ITI program is indeed a small fraction of kids who need help.

“Someone on our team explained it so well recently. They said, ‘Well, would you rather have us deliver it to 100% of kids in Illinois and it’s a mildly intense intervention, or would you like us to hit this bottom 5% that don’t typically get resources and hit them intensely,’” Borders said. “In education, we tend to think about tier one interventions — what all kids get — and then there are interventions that are more targeted, and that’s what this is.”

ITI also looked at early fall interim assessments to determine district eligibility, and at students’ social-emotional scores from screenings.

Although tutoring is tailored to meet the specific students’ needs, all tutoring is aligned with district curriculum and meets ISBE’s state standards.

Borders said districts primarily recommend students who are falling behind, but a select few might enroll students who are right on the edge of being bumped up to advanced placement.

“We are firm believers that the districts themselves are the experts on their learners. We enrolled the districts to talk about what the program is, what flexibilities there are that they can make decisions on,” she said. “We try to put that decision where we feel it belongs.”

Coates and his administrative team at Donovan, for example, chose to focus on math.

“It was a school improvement goal to improve math achievement,” he said. “So when we got this opportunity, we wanted to go right after what we thought was our biggest weakness.”

Tutoring is eligible for every student in the district, which has about 300 students across three schools, Coates said.

Donovan didn’t close schools during the pandemic and few students chose the remote-learning option. The district saw a large spike in attendance from transfer students from other districts that went fully remote, and those students also benefited from the tutoring program.

“I physically saw students come to me, catch me in the hallway and brag about their winter math scores, and those kids are in tutoring,” Coates said. “So they’re starting to pay attention to their scores, which is really cool. Kids are motivated.”

Tutoring at Donovan Junior High School starts 15 minutes before school and continues through first-period study hall.

“You assume that in junior high, kids already know basic math facts. I don’t have time during class to go back and teach third grade skills, so tutors have been working on things like that,” said Michele Gray, who teaches sixth, seventh and eighth grade math at Donovan. “Since their confidence level in their actual math skills is improving, they’re not turning in incomplete assignments and they feel better about themselves.”

ISBE is slated to release new data highlighting the impact of the tutoring initiative later this spring, but Borders said it’s about more than just the test scores.

“We’re addressing academic needs, and the hope is when you build foundational skills, then students can start moving a little quicker,” she said. “We want kids to be confident in the classroom because that’s when real learning can occur.”

On March 15, the state voted to extend high-impact tutoring into the next school year, using remaining federal COVID-19 relief funds.

Illinois State University and Governors State University, along with a few other Illinois colleges, are hosting job fairs and training to continue to supply the tutors, several of whom are already based in the communities where they would tutor.

“As a small-town, rural-community superintendent, the connections we make with the community when they come in and work with our students has been a really nice unintended consequence,” Coates said.

At Century 21 Primary Center, part of Park Forest District 163, tutor Sharon Evans helps third grade students in math and reading at the same school her four children attended. They’re now adults and she’s now a grandma.

Before retiring, Evans was the director of admissions and student recruitment at Governors State University. She recalled that in her job interview, “years and years ago,” she told the interviewer she wanted to run her own day care.

That didn’t pan out, but “I said if I can make a difference in one child, I’m going to do that,” Evans said. “They’re little children, but they’re going to grow up and be something.”

The social-emotional connection is one of the most important aspects of tutoring, especially when teaching in an underfunded district, she said. Report card data shows 83% of students in the Park Forest school district are low-income.

“One thing I know for sure is that when you have a strong relationship with them, you can look at their face and know if they had a good day or a bad day,” she said.

Evans tutors six students after school four days a week, split up into two groups of three.

“When one child says, ‘I’m not as smart as him,’ I say, ‘Oh, yes, you are.’ I intentionally give each student material they can excel in and then harder stuff after,” she said. “You have to be creative so you’re not boring them, so I do what we call a brain break.”

Evans said she often breaks out a game of tic-tac-toe and implements math problems into the X’s and O’s.

Borders said the tutors, who are paid through ITI, are first asked to identify areas of education they are comfortable with so students are matched accordingly. Tutors then enlist in a training series to learn the grade-level curriculum.

“We’re addressing academic needs and the only requirement we have for tutors is a high school diploma, but what I can say is that’s not the level at which all our tutors are,” Borders said. “We have a lot of teachers and paraprofessionals — ranging from (tutors with) a GED to tutors with doctorate degrees. We are also hoping to leverage our university students across the state and community members so they can use it as a pipeline to get in or stay in the education system.”

Allen-Nichols holds several higher education degrees, including a doctorate in leadership and organizational management from Capella University, and a master’s and doctorate of divinity from Grace Theological Seminary. And in December, she graduated with a doctorate in counseling from Governors State University.

She said she jumped at the opportunity after seeing on campus that there was a call for tutors to work with adolescents.

“It is important, if you have a skill set, if you have an education, if you have the knowledge, that you give it back to the youth,” Allen-Nichols said. “I call it pouring. The knowledge that I’ve gained, I pour it into the children so it propels them into their next level.”

zsyed@chicagotribune.com