Community partners include faith congregations, civic groups, youth organizations, service organizations, PTSAs, and businesses. Each program is strongly supported by local school administrators who refer students, as appropriate. Student participation is voluntary. A parent or guardian brings their student to the site on the first day and as part of an intake interview reviews the program's procedures and expectations and signs various permission forms. While each facility differs slightly in operation, the bulk of each day is spent on homework, with daily school assignments and materials provided by the student's teachers.
Additional time is spent in reflection on behaviors that led to the suspension.
Learning modules that focus on issues ranging from insubordination to fighting allow the student to self examine and provide the tutors with the means to facilitate dialogue. Tutors and mentors are volunteers drawn from the local community. Each volunteer is interviewed by the director and must undergo a state and federal criminal background check. Each program has a full-time director who tailors procedures and operations of the program to the needs of their community and the schools it serves. The director assumes a leadership role with its Board of Directors, recruits, trains and supervises its volunteers, works with students, provides referral information where indicated, gives feedback to the school personnel and reaches out to local congregations, parents, businesses, service and civic groups, informing them about the program and soliciting their support.