William Beckham Academy

When I was a kid, I went to Goodale Elementary School for kindergarten (1966-1967). Today, the building is torn down, but on the same site is the William Beckham Academy, a Detroit Public School that serves pre-K through grade 5. Today I signed up to be a pre-K reading tutor there!

Detroit Public Schools had I believe the lowest test scores in the nation this last year (or at least really close to it). That created a sense of outrage and an urgent call to action. Robert Bobb, who is more or less running the Detroit Public Schools now, has put out a call for volunteers to help tutor pre-K students in reading. The idea is that research shows that if students can be at reading level at grade 3, there is hope for them. If students aren't at reading level by grade 3 there are all kinds of problems that stem from that. So his goal is to start with this year's pre-K class, and work with them and subsequent classes so that they will be up to reading level. That strategy makes a lot of sense in the long run, so long as you aren't already a K-12 student in the DPS. But with limited resources a start needs to be made somewhere.

I volunteered to be a reading tutor and attended the orientation today at Renaissance High School. A display there showed that there were 3,639 volunteers who signed up. On the radio yesterday, Robert Bobb said that 2,500 had already RSVP'd to the orientation session, and 1,500 had already completed paperwork to get fingerprinted and get a background check done. At the event today, he mentioned that 1,100 of the volunteers were from Detroit, the rest were from over 100 communities outside Detroit (including 2 volunteers from Windsor!). As I looked around the room today, it appeared that about 2/3 of the volunteers were Caucasian.

I looked on the DPS website and found they serve approximately 90,000 students. With 14 grades (pre-K, and K-12), that would be about 6430 students in each grade, assuming a uniform grade distribution (which probably wouldn't be the case with a high dropout rate in high school and there would be relatively few pre-K students). Nevertheless, for approximation purposes let's assume 6430 students in each grade. Reading tutors each tutor two students per week for 30 minutes each. So Robert Bobb would need about 3215 volunteer tutors (6430/2=3215) this year, assuming each volunteer passes a background check and actually shows up. So he should be doing pretty good this year with 3639 volunteers signed up. But he is going to have to get that many new tutors next year, for next year's pre-K class, even assuming all of this year's tutors return next year to continue with the same students through kindergarten. Ultimately, then, he is going to need about 16,075 volunteers each year to handle the full pre-K through grade 3 when this program is up to full speed. I wonder what his plan is to recruit and retain that many volunteers in the long run?

I signed up to tutor at the William Beckham Academy. Click on the photo for the map of this school's boundaries. I looked on the DPS website and found some statistics. This school does pre-K through grade 5. This school has received "Ed Yes!" grades of "A" for each of the last 8 school years, whatever that means. Their AYP Status is Phase 7, "did not make AYP" (this has something to do with No Child Left Behind?). Last school year, 54% of third graders scored at grade reading level on the MEAP test, 27% in writing, 51% in English Language Arts, and 62% in mathematics. There are 702 students enrolled this school year, 2 of them American Indian, 5 White, and 695 Black. 554 of the students are economically disadvantaged. There were no Type A offenses, 5 Type B offenses (2 vandalism, 3 fighting), and 1 Type V offense (battery of employee).