1 Month of Tutoring for 250 South Bronx Students

Dear City Year Champions,

City Year New York is grateful for your donations to support 55 corps members as they tutored 250 students in the South Bronx. Through these contributions, you assisted City Year in taking one step closer to achieving our mission to end the dropout crisis. Every 26 seconds a student gives up on school, resulting in more than one million American high school students who drop out every year. The South Bronx has the third highest annual dropout rate in all of New York City. By supporting these corps members you are helping the students of the South Bronx to stay in school and on track to graduate.

IMPACT

Your contribution played an important role in enabling our dedicated and diverse teams of corps members to support the students of the South Bronx Community through literacy tutoring. Our corps members (young leaders between the ages of 17 to 24 who dedicate a year of their lives to full-time service) tutored one-on-one and in small groups during school hours and led out-of-class extension activities that complemented school instruction. Through focused
literacy tutoring- working directly with each student to address their individual literacy needs- our corps members helped students get back on track to reading at grade level.

In the South Bronx, City Year New York works with six elementary and middle schools, supporting students in grades 3-8. These schools are: Middle School 302, Middle School 424, Public School 130, Public School 154, Public School 48 and Public School 75. Typically during targeted literacy intervention, corps members work with students in one of three areas: vocabulary, fluency or comprehension. From reading passages out loud together to introducing new techniques for note taking and comprehension, corps members work to build the fundamental skills our students need to be strong, independent readers and writers. When EOY Data is available we will share those updates with you. We anticipate having that information by Fall of 2013.

STORY FROM SERVICE

Perhaps the best way to share the impact of your contributions is through the stories from our Corps Members about the work they completed with the students of the South Bronx Community. Below are three stories highlighting the growth of students as they worked one-on-one with Corps Members.

PS 48

At the beginning of the year, I met Kate**. She was a very nice 3^rd grader that was always eager to please. 
However, she found it difficult to focus, to do math, and read. She struggled in her classes, and was rapidly losing confidence in her abilities.  Fortunately, Kate was placed on my literacy focus list.  We worked hard and read together often and I helped her in class to stay focused not only on her English Language Arts work but also her math class.  Now, at the end of the year, Kate in the most consistently focused student in my class and is always the first to raise her hand.  She works independently in math and has gone up three reading levels, bringing her to third grade level skill.  I am so proud of Kate and enjoyed working with her this year.

PS 75

John** is a 4^th grade student with a big heart and huge imagination. In school, John has trouble focusing on his work and writing essays. Whenever he got frustrated, he would break down. In the first few months, I worked with him one-on-one in essay writing, and eventually he was able to write quality work on his own. His 1 out of 4 grades became 3 out of 4s and sometimes even perfect 4 out of 4s! Working with students like John made me realize the value that a positive mentor can have on a young person’s life, and I feel fortunate to have been able to work
with John this year.

MS 302

I met Tarah** at the beginning of the year as she began her 8^th grade experience. I noticed that most of the time she wasn’t focused in math class and I asked her why. She told me school was boring, so I asked her, what did she not find boring then? She stated, and I quote, “texting and sleeping.” Needless to say, I knew I had my work cut out for me. Tarah was failing ELA and barely passing math. Tarah wasn’t on my focus list, but I felt like she was being forgotten in the classroom because she was so quiet. I decided to check in with her every day in math and sit with her for the beginning of class to get her started on the day’s work. I gave her methods that made math more exciting and even though she said it was boring most of the time—she was completing more work than she had been and her grades started to improve. She started coming to my tutoring hours, and I encouraged her to join me with the rest of my focus list. Tarah joined City Year After School and came every day to my tutoring sessions. Her grades in ELA improved immensely and she met a lot of new people in the after school space where she recognized her passion for science. She may never stop saying school is boring—but at least now I know that she is just joking around because no one laughs as much as her during class and when we work together. At the last tutoring session, my mentor teacher said to me, “what you have done with Tarah this year is just short of miraculous.” It meant a lot to me to hear that from an experienced educator and to see that I wasn’t the only one noticing a change in her behavior.

**Student names have been
modified to protect the identity of the students.