28th March 2012 9:00
By Blue Tutors
In a last minute turnaround, 3,500 New York City school students won’t lose funding for private tuition which they were expected to. Reported on the New York Times website, the Education Department had previously announced that a large proportion of students who had already qualified for the extra tuition under the ‘No Child Left Behind’ programme, were set to lose their funding after the number of eligible schools nearly doubled. However, it was decided that no child already receiving the extra help should now be denied it, despite the increased budgetary pressure.
The new criteria for selecting eligible students will instead apply to anyone who hasn’t received extra tuition before. The decision is that only students who qualify for free lunch at schools (the ‘very poor’) will now qualify, rather than students who received reduced price meals, which was the benchmark previously.
Stephen Duch, the principal of Hillcrest High School said that students eligible for reduced price meals aren’t exactly ‘well-off’. He added that a typical family of 4, living on a household income of $41,000, are unable to dedicate much money to private tuition.
New York hasn’t had to impose tight restrictions on private tuition before, because the demand has never exceeded funding limits. The criteria now doesn’t just include family income, but also requires students to be considered academically struggling, meaning that that scored only level 1 or 2 on state maths and English exams. One of the reasons that those eligible for the tuition has increased by so many, is because these state exams have recently been made much harder.