Challenged By Success

During Reach's planning year, there came a point when I knew that planning for possibilities had become futile. We had done all the learning we could do in the abstract, and we needed to launch programming to learn through our experiences. This week brought another unexpected challenge, but one that we will undoubtedly learn from.

Two of our third grade students recently left the program. One day, they came in and told me that they would be attending a different after-school program. Due to their teacher's illness and the Thanksgiving holiday, I didn't get an explanation of this decision for a number of weeks. The explanation: the two girls had improved so quickly that they had become more appropriate for some of the school's other offerings.

Both girls entered the program with very low reading abilities. Despite other concerns, their teacher felt that basic literacy remediation was the most pressing need. The girls were not yet in a place to benefit from one of the school's other tutoring programs, one that focuses on reading comprehension and testing strategies. By November, that had changed. Their basic literacy skills had improved so dramatically that targeted instruction in comprehension and testing strategies was now appropriate.

My response to this news is two-fold. It's fantastic that our intervention is creating such dramatic improvements in basic literacy skills like decoding and fluency. However, I believe we could have continued to help those students by developing the higher-level comprehension skills as well. Sadly, we were never given that chance. As Reach grows, I have no doubt that we'll show our ability to move with the changing needs of our students. Our ability to be successful with our students will lead to increased confidence in our efforts. A day will come when we will no longer lose students due to our success.

When I explained this transition, and the explanation, to the tutors that had been working with these two girls, they were surprised. While they were pleased to hear that this transition occurred due to their success, they were also frustrated by what could have been. When I told Joyce, one of the tutors, that the girls were seeking targeted instruction in more advanced skills, her response was simple: "We could have done that."

She's right. One day, we'll have the opportunity to prove it.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

Mark