Some of these students are fulfilling volunteer requirements for education, social work or pharmacy classes. Five FWS tutors spend two days a week at a library site and two days a week tutoring at a Community Education after-school program site. The Austin Independent School District Department of Curriculum has also provided some additional training for our volunteers. Today, the program is funded by the City of Austin and directed by the Austin Independent School District Office of Community Education. Volunteer hours and student visits are recorded at each site and entered into a central database on a monthly basis.
Tutors fill out weekly notes on their students to track progress.
We send questionnaires and evaluation forms to teachers to get anecdotal feedback on student performance. Since we joined the President's Coalition for the America Reads Challenge, we have started to use a simple sight word recognition assessment at the beginning and end of the semester for our elementary students. All of this information is included in an annual program evaluation. Because we depend on volunteers to provide tutoring, we do outreach on an on-going basis. We sent out a press release when we joined the President's Coalition for the America Reads Challenge, and had a nice article about our summer reading buddies program in the local paper.