At 8 a.m. one Saturday in March, Sports Club members at Iroquois Middle School spread their books and notebooks on cafeteria tables. Three seventh-graders work together on a vocabulary lesson. Monsoon is a flood. At another table, Justin Henderson, a freshman at Doss High School and a former member of the Iroquois Sports Club, helps Lance Davis with his social studies homework. Once you get through looking at them, I'm going to quiz you on that.
Lance promises to buckle down in school.
That's why my grades went down. I'm going to start trying to catch up again. Language arts teacher Janet Coffey, the Sports Club coordinator at Iroquois, sits at a table on the stage and consults a master list of grades and attendance records for the 180 students in the program. Every few minutes, she calls a new student up for a conference. I'm here because it makes a difference in my classroom.