Indianapolis district streamlines NCLB tutoring.

It's one thing for struggling schools to provide free tutoring services to low-income students under the No Child Left Behind law. Ensuring that students have the resources to take advantage of the opportunities is another matter.

To meet that challenge, Indianapolis Public Schools (www.ips.k12.in.us) has made the process of signing up for tutoring services more thorough and understandable for parents. As a result, the district's participation rate is among the highest in the nation--more than 60 percent of its 3,500 eligible students signed up for free tutoring last school year.

Carrie Reinking, supplemental educational services (SES) facilitator for the district, attributes its success to the multiple methods of communication it uses with parents.

"It's not just one notification [to parents], it's over and then you are not communicating with them anymore," says Reinking, whose district has 16 Title I schools that provide federally subsidized NCLB tutoring to low-income students.

The district publishes a brochure for parents containing descriptions of all of the state-approved tutoring providers doing business with the district, which range from nonprofit to for-profit, to community based. In the brochure is a parental request form in which a parent can choose the provider. The tutoring organizations offer different specialties--such as the Dyslexia Institute of Indiana--and different approaches (some are computer based), but most students are tutored at the school site, many in groups.

Indianapolis Public Schools holds a provider fair at the beginning of the year to allow parents to meet personally with the tutoring organizations. Those face-to-face encounters make parents feel more comfortable about choosing a provider, she says.

"It's all about putting parents in the driver's seat," she adds.

The district also walks parents through the selection process over the phone. If parents don't receive guidance, they may become so overwhelmed with options that they won't participate at all, says Reinking.

Unlike some other districts, which may restrict enrollment in a tutoring program to the first month of the school year, the Indianapolis district lets parents enroll kids at any time, she says. Open enrollment is important because many parents don't realize at the start of the year that their child needs help, and "by report card time, they might change their mind," she adds.

To prevent students from falling through the cracks, the district employs a computer system that tracks how many eligible students in a school have not signed up for free tutoring. The system can also show which of those students have not yet turned in their forms to enroll in the free or reduced-price lunch program, which guarantees eligibility for the free tutoring services.

The tutoring services are "an opportunity our kids have," Reinking says, "and we want to facilitate making that happen."

FAST FACT

Nearly 450,000 eligible students have received free supplemental educational services, like tutoring or public school choice, under NCLB.

Source: 2007 U.S. Ed Department NCLB Fact Sheet