Las Cruces Sun-News (Las Cruces, NM) October 26, 2007

HEADLINE: No Child Left Behind offers free tutoring, but few sign up

By Ashley Meeks

LAS CRUCES -- Free tutoring. Come and get it. Just 6 percent of Las Cruces students eligible for it have signed up -- and the deadline is today.

As part of No Child Left Behind, schools that have failed to meet Adequate Yearly Progress for three years -- there are seven in Las Cruces -- are required to provide supplemental educational services to children from low-income households, who are on the rolls for free and reduced-price lunches.

Letters in English and Spanish explaining the free SES tutoring, which is outsourced to for-profit companies approved by the state, were handed to students four weeks ago to take home.

Betsy Bennett has worked with Las Cruces Public Schools for 30 years and has headed up federal programs for the district for 15 of those. She says while registration is still open, few of the 2,449 families eligible take the district up on the option.

"We're not getting a whole lot, maybe 150 at the most," she said.

The good news is, in-school tutoring lasts all year. Mayfield High School offers tutoring before and after school and during lunch, which math teacher Marilyn Gutman said is frequently attended by 10 to 30 students.

"We're real proud," Gutman said of the local tutoring efforts, which have higher participation rates partially because they don't require a student fill out forms or go to an alternate location. "We've got someone here if they need, and on a daily basis. If you didn't understand something today, they can get help today."

The SES picture's not much different nationwide. ABC News reported in 2006 that according to the Education Department, just 11 percent of eligible children received tutoring in 2004 -- 226,000 out of nearly 2 million in the country.

Those numbers don't worry Superintendent Stan Rounds, who said while SES is a valuable piece of the tutoring spectrum, it's a small one that's "less compelling" to parents than local resources offered by individual schools.

Starting this year, before-school tutors have been offered at all the middle schools and at select elementary schools. Unlike SES, those programs are open to all students, whereas for the low-income SES tutoring, "who gets served is not our decision."

Rounds said the district and the city were also examining a partnership to jointly provide grant-funded tutoring, which may gain momentum in the spring.

In the meantime, families eligible for SES can choose from 20 companies to help their children with subjects like reading and math. Those companies are allotted $1,300 per pupil out of the district's Title I budget — that's $137,000 for 150 students. Companies that apply range from hard-to-monitor online programs to those that pay local, certified teachers $60 an hour to take on three or four students in group tutoring.

Were there the demand, the district would be required to spend $1,436,401 on the supplemental tutoring.

"So from a financial standpoint, it's good that not many families are signing up," Bennett said.

It's more than that.

It's not clear that the set-up has done more than local, in-school tutoring programs.

The out-sourced tutoring has been offered at San Andres, the local alternative high school, for years.

"We've never had anyone take it," Bennett said. "Some of the students are working, some of them are moms."

Since No Child Left Behind was enacted, only Booker T. Washington Elementary School has left behind its "school in need of improvement" status.

And Bennett said the system remains completely unproved.

"There are no statistics as to the effect of supplemental education services and that's across the nation," she said. "Any individual attention a child's going to get is going to help to some degree ... (but) the last couple years, we've had very few people sign up for tutoring."

The good news is, if the money goes unused, schools can put it back into their own budgets and after-school programs.

"I would like to see our schools provide as many opportunities for our children to be as successful as possible," Bennett said. "Even to read to them, that attention (is beneficial). There's no doubt about that, so we believe strongly in additional assistance. We strongly believe in that, so if we don't put the money into (outside tutoring) we can put it into our own programs."

Rounds agrees in the power of local programs.

"The things we've got are blind to economic provision. They serve all students, all comers, if you will," Rounds said of the before-school programs and the city-school after-school programs in the works. "It doesn't have a fancy name, either. We're just taking care of kids."