A tutoring program in MPS schools makes massive gains for students

Published June 6, 2024

n the fall of 2022, a tutoring program named Forward Scholars launched in five MPS schools. But the start of the program started before that when the non-profit, Common Ground, held a listening session with over 100 community members and asked them what they wanted to see done with local ESSER funds — the appropriated federal money during the early time of COVID-19. Resoundingly, the community said reading tutoring for youth.

Forward Scholars, once a part of Common Ground, is now a fully recognized 501C3, which still works with the larger organization to partner with MPS schools and provide “high dosage intervention” tutoring, or working one-on-one with students and creating individualized lesson plans.

“If kids are reading by the end of third grade they're most likely to graduate from high school,” says Executive Director, Dr. Carrie Strieff-Stuessy. “We really look at data at schools to make sure that we are getting into schools that might not necessarily have support already in place for those kindergarten through third grade [kids].”

This past year, Forward Scholars was in seven MPS schools with plans to grow to 12 schools for the 2024-25 school year. The process for figuring out which schools to partner with is twofold: first, building in schools that already have some kind of community partnership and then, finding schools that otherwise wouldn’t have access to this kind of tutoring.