August 10, 2003

Tutoring programs a summer attraction; Hundreds of Syracuse elementary school pupils attend six-week sessions by Paul Riede, Staff writer

The children in Jennifer Pagano's class separated into small groups Wednesday, grabbed pencils and crayons and intently traced and colored different shapes onto a sheet of paper.

It didn't look like a typical math class, but Pagano's pupils - who will enter second grade in Syracuse schools next month - were learning about triangles, trapezoids and hexagons. It was an elementary geometry lesson in the middle of summer, and the children were having fun.

The activity at Newton Learning's summer program took up 15 minutes of a 45-minute class that was fully scripted by curriculum writers hundreds of miles away. Pagano needed only the day's lesson plan, a box of supplies sent from the home office and her experience as a city teacher to keep the youngsters on task.

The Newton Learning program - held at Our Lady of Pompei School, 915 N. McBride St. - is the largest of four federally mandated tutoring sessions going on this summer in Syracuse. The federal No Child Left Behind Act requires that children from schools with consistently poor test scores be offered free tutoring in reading and math above and beyond the regular school day.

Ten Syracuse schools fell into that category last year, making about 4,400 children eligible for the free tutoring. About 300 children turned up for the tutoring, which is being offered by Newton and three other programs - the YMCA, Kaplan K12 Learning Services and the Internet-based Babbage.Net School. That's about a third the number of children who are attending Syracuse's regular summer school for elementary children this year.

Because the Syracuse school district has been labeled a "district in need of improvement" by the state, it cannot be a provider of the federally mandated tutoring. Instead, it must use its federal Title I money to hire other providers.

Even so, eight of the 11 teachers hired by Newton are Syracuse district teachers, said Randi Ludwig, local director of the program. Ludwig, who hired the teachers, was an administrative assistant at Franklin Elementary School during the last school year. Her position was among those cut from the budget, but she may return to the district as a teacher this year.

Partly because Ludwig aggressively publicized the Newton program at Franklin, and partly because Our Lady of Pompei is close to the North Side school, more than 90 percent of the children in the Newton program are Franklin students, Ludwig said. That's despite the fact that the program was open to children from seven elementary schools across the city. The eligible elementary schools are Blodgett, Dr. King, Elmwood, Franklin, LeMoyne, McKinley-Brighton and Van Duyn. Pupils from Grant, Lincoln and Shea middle schools also are eligible for tutoring under the federal law.

Newton is a division of New York City-based Edison Schools, the nation's largest private manager of public schools. It provides incentives to keep children coming to its program. The families of children who post perfect attendance during the six-week program get a $100 gift card redeemable at stores. Children who miss one day get a $75 card, and those who miss two get a $50 card.

After five weeks in the program, 140 children are in line for some level of gift card. Ludwig said 98 of those have perfect attendance and are in line for the full $100. That's more than half of the daily attendance of about 190 children.

In addition to those incentives, children get a raffle ticket each day they attend during the week. At the end of each week a raffle is held and a prize is given to the winner in each class. Ludwig says those are strong incentives for children to keep up their attendance at the three-hour-a-day program, but they are not enough to explain the strong numbers. "If this curriculum wasn't engaging, they wouldn't come every day," she said.

Like Pagano's math class, each lesson during the program is scripted in advance by Newton Learning. Teachers get minute-to-minute lesson plans and a box containing all of the materials called for in the plans. That allows teachers to provide creative, hands-on lessons every day without having to buy materials or go through extensive planning, Ludwig said.

Newton tested the pupils when they entered the program and will test them again when they leave to measure their progress. But Ludwig said she has no doubt the tutoring will help them when they go back to school next month."They're going to be better prepared," she said. "They'll have been reading and writing for six weeks."