No Mind Left Behind: Free Tutoring Services for Pre-K to 12th Graders

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Percentage of graduates from local higher education institutions that remain in LA County 5 years after graduating

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City of Los Angeles

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Inglewood and Compton, California

With the help of LA2050, No Mind Left Behind Tutoring Services will make Los Angeles the place to CREATE because we will open the doors to growth in the educational system throughout the nation with our proven successful program.

Over the past two years, I’m A Movement Not A Monument’s tutoring services has been fortunate enough to tutor and assist more than 350 students, and we are looking forward to helping more.

I'm A Movement Not A Monument will hire more tutors looking to improve the education system, and also provide intern hours for college students in the educational field. We will also recruit peer tutors per site allowing juniors and seniors to get involved by giving back to their community in a unique way. Every student that is a peer tutor will receive volunteer hours allowing them to graduate high school with additional Honors and recognition, thus strengthening their college resume for scholarships.

We will be able to engage more students with our services, which in turn provides a quality convenience to a community with minimal amenities, keeping children off the streets and engaging them in more mentorship, leading them to post secondary options rather than jail or early teen pregnancy.

If our communities fail to CREATE signature programs such as No Mind Left Behind, Los Angeles will not improve. Inglewood School District is already in receivership as schools are under capacity due to parents pulling their students from certain public schools and bringing their scholar to a charter school. Such changes force budget cuts due to enrollment decreases, which result in the termination of teachers, cutting of after school programs, and minimizing janitorial services making the teachers unmotivated to teach and the students unmotivated to learn. Also, a lack of security on site in areas that gangs are infested results in the unapproved presence of gang members and riots erupting.

We are forced to maintain school systems in the inner city where teachers are in fear of their lives because our children are being raised in the streets rather than in adequate environments consisting of educated and effective guardians, mentors and advocates. It takes a village to raise a child and it is not only up to the parent. If we left it just up to a single mom who can barely afford rent, utilities may be shut off, the family might then be placed on government assistance of some sort, and the household is left struggling to get by on a daily basis, forcing an ongoing cycle of instability and poverty.

I know we can help change this system by CREATING quality after school programs that improve our children’s lives by working hand in hand with teachers on a consistent basis, with ultimate efforts to build a solidly structured team focused on uplifting our youth.

I’m A Movement Not A Monument monitors the success of our tutoring service from the time we interview each student and create an academic profile for them. We implement weekly progress reports for every student to track their performance and exhibit increase or decrease per subject. Finally, we create monthly timed assessment tests to allow each student to show us how they are advancing. This hands-on approach allows us to determine where the student is having problems, enabling our team to catch the mistakes and gradually and consistently improve their performance.

We ultimately measure our success by having every student show up to each session prepared to learn. In the past, we have assessed a ninth grader at a fourth grade reading level and fifth grade math level. This is one of many similar cases we have encountered in our program.

As mentioned in item #11, the performance of our students is strongly related to their everyday environments. Many of these at-risk youth end up in jail or pregnant at an early age. In 2014, out of 86,823 California juveniles, more than 60% are Black and Hispanic, and ¼ of these juveniles are eventually detained with a 2nd offense (www.aog.ca.gov). Also, a total of 249,078 babies were born to women aged 15–19 years, for a birth rate of 24.2 (www.cdc.gov). Being aware of such statistics will help enhance the measure of the No Mind Left Behind program’s success.

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