'High Dosage Tutoring' Would Replace Arts, Gym For Some Students

EVANSTON, IL — Some families would have the option of forgoing fine arts or physical education classes in the fall in favor of "high dosage tutoring" under an Evanston/Skokie School District 65 plan.

The District 65 school board voted unanimously at a special meeting Thursday to apply for a waiver to the Illinois State Board of Education's P.E. requirement. State law requires no such waiver to cut back offerings of visual arts, music or drama classes.

The proposed tutoring program uses funding from the latest round of federal coronavirus relief aimed at addressing learning loss from the past 18 months of academic disruptions.

It would hire about 60 non-union tutors, train them and assign them to up to 2,600 students per trimester, targeting students whose test results indicate they learn at between 25 percent and 50 percent of standards for their grade level. Students and tutors would meet 30 to 40 minutes a day, three to five times a week for at least 10 weeks, and potentially longer.

Kirby Callam, director of EvanSTEM, is set to supervise the new program, dubbed Academic Skill Centers. He told board members recent research shows one-on-one tutoring is the most effective intervention to help students who fall behind.

Callam said the extra tutoring, which will take place using Massachusetts-based Curriculum Associates' iReady software, should be considered acceleration rather than a form of remediation.

"Remediation is like taking one of your children or two of your children away from the dinner table, they have to eat at a separate table, and they get a different meal. That's remediation," Callam said. "What acceleration is, the students at the dinner table, eating the same meal — and they get a vitamin."

For District 65 elementary school students, the tutoring would take place during existing blocks of time already scheduled for "acceleration." Parents would be notified, but administrators would not need to ask their permission.

For middle schoolers, the tutoring would replace P.E. or time scheduled for rotating classes dubbed "specials," such as art, drama, music and media arts. School officials would contact parents of children in the second-lowest academic quartile to offer the option of opting out of one of those classes.

District 65 Board President Anya Tanyavutti said it was important that administrators be very careful with how they approach parents, who want to feel like they have some agency over their children's educational experience.

"I'm pretty sensitive to this. I think, as a Black mother, I have oftentimes experienced where folks are preaching to me about parenting skills with an assumption that Black moms don't know how to parent or need some kind of help or guidance with that, in ways that can be offensive and frustrating," Tanyavutti said.

"I would really be concerned if a lot of our parents were told, 'You have a choice, however if you're going to opt your child out of this, you're probably making a bad parenting choice,'" she added. "I think we need to feel like we have true choice, and that there's not judgment or coercion built into the options that are presented to them."

Superintendent Devon Horton pointed out parents normally do not have the opportunity to choose their children's classes.

"Speaking of middle school specifically, I don't know how much choice we give families to take classes normally," Horton said. "Right now, this is probably one of the first times we've been out in the open with choice, as far as receiving these additional supports."

From World War II to 2017, Illinois state law required physical education every day, although districts had the option of seeking a waiver to the requirement. Four years ago, the "Invest in Kids Act" reduced it to three days a week, with no time requirement. A 2018 bill that would have required 150 minutes a week instead was vetoed by former Gov. Bruce Rauner.

Maria Barroso, president of Evanston/Skokie District 65 Educators' Council, the bargaining unit that represents teachers in the district, spoke during public comment in opposition to the tutoring plan.

Barroso said pulling students out of P.E. or fine arts to go sit in front of a computer was not the right way to address learning loss. Instead, students need more opportunities to express themselves and explore their feelings amid the ongoing trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic.

"Our fine arts teachers and P.E. will help students adjust to being back in school as they implement culturally relevant teaching and address equity initiatives. Our educators are trained to handle a crisis and keep students safe. We need to provide structure and create routines for our students," Barroso said.

"Students are to [be] removed from mainstream classes to work on a computer, they will be segregated from their peers," she said. "We worry these students may be racially and or linguistically identifiable. Also, several students may be from our diverse learning population."