We help newly arrived Spanish-speaking 8th grade students
The Los Ayudantes school-based tutoring and mentoring program is designed for newly arrived Spanish-speaking 8th grade students enrolled in McKinley Institute of Technology MIT middle school’s Structured English Immersion Program. MIT is a year-round magnet school located in Redwood City and has a student population primarily comprised of Hispanic students.
The students served by our program are all eligible for free lunches, a key indicator of poverty since only families living below the federal poverty level qualify for this assistance. We hope that our program will help more students in this group to become proficient and confident in English before entering High School.
Our students began both the 2003/2004 and the 2004/2005 academic years reading English at or below the 3rd. grade level and, without our program, would have entered high school with very low proficiency in English. Before participation in our program, their scores on the standardized computerized reading inventory test (SRI), a required test for all Redwood City School students, were noted as “Far Below Basic,” meaning that their reading English skills were so low their responses could not be scored.
However, in the most recent retaking of the SRI test (June, 2005) as was true for June 2004, after being in our program, all the students’ scores improved dramatically and showed the greatest gain among any group of MIT students. The median and mean scores were 433 and 286 respectively. These scores represented gains in reading skills from 2nd grade to 6th grade levels.