Tutors, tests, coaches and summer school: NC schools earmark big money to combat learning loss

“We need that full-time [teaching assistant] in my room, there’s no question about it,” Pacos said during a visit to her Wildwood Forest Elementary School classroom.

She doesn’t have one. North Carolina cut funds for thousands of them years ago. And she needs one more than ever.

Students across the state have struggled during the past two years. The COVID-19 pandemic prompted school closures that lasted a year or longer for some students—forcing many to try to navigate virtual learning, sometimes in the absence of working parents. Some students with developmental delays weren’t able to get the same level of attention they might have received in person.

That’s where people such as Rachael Poirier come in. Poirier is a reading tutor assigned to Pacos’ class. She is crucial toward helping Pacos’ students who need reading intervention. “We obviously do a lot of reading, a lot of repetition,” Poirier said. “And we also do a lot of writing. And they do [phonics] tests every week.”

She’s among the army of tutors, learning coaches and behavioral health specialists who have been hired or contracted by local school systems to aid learning recovery. Schools are conducting before-school, after-school and summer learning programs.

The systems are ramping up testing student progress during the school year. They’re placing more students in their “multi-tiered systems of support” that are designed to determine the level of intervention students need, including disability services, according to a WRAL News review of federal stimulus package applications from 31 school systems in central and eastern North Carolina.

This year’s first graders, at a critical age for learning to read, had never attended a full school year in a physical classroom until this year, even if they attended pre-school. That hurts the students academically and socially, and it’s often difficult for teachers to find time to focus on the latter struggle, Pacos says.

Poirier helps students who need more individual attention, while Pacos can stay focused on the rest of her class. It’s part of a research-based “high-dosage tutoring” model that requires frequent sessions with just one to three students at a time. It’s the model used by the North Carolina Education Corps, which employs Poirier and about 200 other tutors in two dozen school districts.

Pacos’ first-graders need small group work to become better readers. “They come in at so many different levels, that it's very difficult to do whole group lessons with the children,” she said.

Students have long had differences in classroom progress and have always needed individualized approaches to their learning.

“That's one of the things that makes teaching a difficult job,” said Kathleen A. Dawson, the deputy superintendent of Orange County Schools. But the disparities between students have broadened due to interruptions brought on by the pandemic.

“And although things are getting better, we still are dealing with a lot of challenges,” Dawson said. Staffing remains a challenge, as well as COVID-related absences. “Once we get past those hurdles,” she said, “we'll be able to do better.”

High-dosage tutoring appears to have made a difference for some students in Granville County Schools, said Lauren Piper, the district’s literacy coordinator. Four North Carolina Education Corps tutors worked with 87 students in the district last year. Tutors helped about one-fifth of those students reach grade-level proficiency and more than three-fifths achieve average or better growth in reading skills, including Piper’s own son, Brayden, who is going into the second grade.

Before tutoring, Brayden could read only six words per minute and none of them were accurate. By the end of the school year, he could read 22 words per minute, with 94% accuracy. The grade-level expectation is 25 words per minute.

“My heart just explodes with this feeling of just gratitude that he has been able to accomplish this much growth in this amount of time,” Piper said. Brayden is confident now, picking up books off of book shelves now and trying to read them. “And he didn't before,” she said. “He didn't want anything to do with a book before.”

Schools are tracking what works and what doesn’t toward learning recovery; they’re required to evaluate the impact of how they used their stimulus funds. Research can provide a guide toward what schools should explore. For example, some research suggests that high-dosage tutoring is effective but isn’t as clear on other types of tutoring.

More learning recovery efforts are in the offing. The 31 school districts reviewed by WRAL have spent more than $900 million of all of their stimulus funds, with nearly $900 million more planned for programs through September 2024, much of that for learning recovery. They have about $389.2 million more in federal funds they still haven’t applied to use.

No statewide data readily exist on how much has already been spent on learning recovery.

Durham Public Schools, with the $28 million it’s committed toward learning recovery so far, has hired or plans to hire 212 temporary workers with its federal funding, according to a district budget presentation. That includes 55 coaches devoted exclusively to speeding up the pace of student learning— “acceleration” in the parlance of educators.

Acceleration is a different approach to learning recovery than more traditional methods of remedial coursework. Remediation requires students to go over material they didn’t master and delay going over new material. In accelerated learning, students go back over only what they absolutely need to know to keep learning new lessons.

“If you're spending all of your time on remediation, then you're not helping students catch up,” Durham Public Schools spokesman Chip Sudderth said. “And furthermore, you're not addressing some of the core needs that the students have.”

Students’ learning could be inhibited by other issues. That’s why the school system is hiring behavioral health staff and support staff for students with higher needs.

Sudderth says the district is still working on hiring everyone, something other school systems say they’re doing, too.

Orange County Schools has budgeted $3.3 million so far toward learning recovery, including short-term staffing targeting higher-needs students and students from disadvantaged backgrounds. The school system will also do mid-year assessments and work on social-emotional learning and interventions for students who may need higher levels of support.

“It's not like our students are overall the same on every single skill and standard,” said Dawson, the Orange deputy superintendent. “There are times that they're going to be strong in one area, but then weak in another and that's true for all of us. So it's really identifying those areas and saying, ‘OK, here's where we need to scaffold some more, here's where we need to push someone to give them higher level opportunities.’”

Although the state General Assembly required school systems to provide summer learning for all grade levels during the summer of 2021, the legislature didn’t impose such a requirement this year..

Lawmakers continue to require summer reading camps for the lowest grade levels, and they’re now requiring a career accelerator program this summer for sixth through 12th grades.

Some of the schools systems reviewed by WRAL News are planning another six-week summer learning program for at-risk students this year but many are not.

Data on how well it went last year were underwhelming. Most of the students invited to attend summer learning camps last year — all students identified as “at risk” of not advancing to the next grade level — did not even enroll. Attendance was spotty even among many who did. Just about 574,000 of the 157,000 first- through third-graders who were invited enrolled.

Most students who attended did not end up testing on grade level.

Poirier became a tutor because she’s considering a career as a teacher. She applied in July and began working as a tutor in October, after some training on working with the students.

“I have seen so much growth already,” Poirier said. “It's awesome, and I love to see it so much.”

The teachers Poirier works with give her guidance on what students need to work on and what benchmarks they want students to meet.

Some didn’t know how to read yet when Poirier started working with them. After some intensive tutoring, they caught on and can now read basic books for their grade level.

Pacos regrets what she can’t do during the school day. Students have more needs right now and teachers’ plates are full. The teaching assistants the school does have are pulled to cover classrooms as substitute teachers more often these days.

The school purchased a social-emotional learning curriculum that teaches children skills for listening, paying attention, controlling their behavior and getting along with others. “I can't get to it most days,” Pacos said.

But Pacos says she’s glad to have someone like Poirier, for however long she’s able to help.