Annual Report 2007-2008 School Year It is hard to believe that Top Honors has been tutoring students for 6 years now. Over the years, Top Honors developed from a program serving a handful of students per week to serving an average of 28 students per week this past year. In our first year, it was mostly friends that volunteered for our program. This past year, 50 people volunteered their time, some for one session through a program that we have with Accenture, others tutoring on Saturdays throughout the year and yet others helping to write curriculum or supporting the program in other ways. Top Honors wants more than student growth: We want growth WITH results. As such, we have continued to try out new strategies and make improvements to our program. This year marked the third year in a row with 40%+ overall academic gains. Almost as importantly, it was a breakthrough year in terms of student and tutor attendance. The number of tutors who tutored for 15 or more sessions increased from 0 in the 2006-2007 school year to 7 this past year, while the number of students attending 20 or more sessions increased from 1 to 10 during the same time. This Annual Report will highlight our performance during the 2007-2008 school year, report on last yearÕs initiatives, and describe some upcoming projects designed to improve our program for your child while creating a positive environment for our most precious resource, our volunteers. Student
Performance Over the years, Top Honors has stuck to its core educational values: focus on math fundamentals, Edutainment activities to make learning fun, real life examples to make math applicable to students and assessments to track progress. The most contentious of these core values has been our focus on fundamentals. Each year we get a significant number of parents who come in looking for homework help for their children. While this can be valuable, we strongly believe that many students missed the fundamentals of mathematics in school and fall further and further behind because they do not understand fundamental concepts like their multiplication tables and what a decimal means. As such we continue to emphasize to incoming students our exclusive focus on the fundamentals of mathematics. Based on our parent testimonials, we feel even more strongly that this is the best approach for meeting the needs of our students. We are very pleased to announce the results of our 2007-2008 school year. The average improvement between our initial and final assessment was 49%, the third year in a row with over 40% average improvement. The more often students came to our tutoring sessions the more they improved. Students who attended the program at least 20 times had an average improvement of 70%, significantly greater than the overall average. Below are some specific highlights of the performance of our students and program (assessment data compares the beginning of year assessment to the end of year assessment):
This year we will implement more
changes to our program in line with our mission: To provide all students
with fundamental math and critical thinking abilities for success as students
and productive members of society. 2007-2008
Initiatives This past year, we hired two
administrators to come to each weekly tutoring session. Combined they helped to generate a positive
culture among students, tutors, and parents. This year several people walked up to me glowing about how
much more organized the program was compared with prior years. Our primary administrator received a
huge ovation at the end of year event, our most successful yet in terms of
attendance by tutors and parents alike.
To put numbers behind this, in both the 2005-2006 and 2006-2007 school
years, tutors gave Top Honors an average rating of 3.8 out of 5.0 when rating
how well organized sessions were.
This rating increased to 4.5 out of 5.0 for the 2007-2008 school year. This past year, Top Honors
successfully implemented a Points Reward System, a system designed to reward
students for doing positive activities.
Students earned points for attendance, winning games, progressing in
assessments, and good behavior.
The students clearly were excited about this rewards program, and worked
hard to earn points each week.
Throughout the year and at the end of the year, they tasted the fruits
of their hard work by redeeming points for cool prizes. Two of our students successfully
accumulated enough points for our top prize, an iPod Shuffle. The Points Rewards System is credited
with greatly increasing student attendance and longevity. Student attendance increased from 64%
to 68%, with average attendance at sessions increasing from 21 per session in
the 2006-2007 school year to 28 this past year. More importantly, the number of students attending 20 or
more sessions increased from 1 in the 2007-2008 school year to 10 in the
2008-2009 school year. In our end
of year survey to students, nearly 2/3 of them responded that the Points Reward
System ÒInspired them to work harder.Ó
ItÕs worth noting that these rewards could not have been possible
without a generous community service grant from Columbia University!
Last year, we also increased our focus on tutor
development and culture building.
We accomplished this goal by improving availability of administrators
for tutors to discuss issues and give feedback, providing more worksheets for
tutors to give to students, and adding discussion time for tutors. Overall tutor attendance increased from
58% in the 2006-2007 school year to 65% this past year. In addition, a record number of
volunteers will be returning to tutor in the 2008-2009 school year. We believe that this is a direct result
of Top HonorsÕ focus on creating a positive culture among volunteers. Another initiative from this past year was to increase
communication with parents. Top
Honors set aside specific days where parents could come in to talk with our
administrators about their childÕs progress in our program. Those parents who took advantage of
this opportunity appreciated the direct contact. However, based on feedback from parents, we realize that
there is more that we can do to reach out to parents. Top Honors will continue to evaluate ways to involve
parents. Our last initiative of the 2007-2008 school year was to
add a free enrichment-based finance class for advanced high school
students. After gaining some
valuable feedback from some early participants and high school student
volunteers, we realized that the program needed to be changed to better suit
the needs and desires of the average high school student. These changes will be discussed more
below. 2008-2009
Initiatives As in previous years, Top Honors plans to test a few new
initiatives in the upcoming school year.
Over the summer, we added two new Board members who will help us execute
on them. Simon Simonsky was a
tutor last year and has agreed to join our Board. Simon works in investment banking and will be managing the
startup of our new programs, which initially will be our new THinc Money program.
Alison Polton-Simon was also a tutor last year and is the first high
school student to ever join our Board.
Alison will focus on recruiting high school students as math tutors and
prospective students for our THinc Money program. As alluded to above, Top Honors has decided to split its
finance program into two pieces.
The first piece, THinc Money, is
a personal finance class in which we teach high school students about credit
cards, online payments, budgeting, paying for college and what options they
have for extra money. Since it is
a pilot program, students who tutor in the core math program will be able to
earn additional volunteer credits for participating in the THinc
Money program and providing us valuable
feedback for future lessons. The
syllabus for the second piece will be determined based on the needs and desires
of the students who choose to participate in the THinc Money program. Our second major initiative is to
significantly increase the number of high school volunteer tutors we have. We have gradually increased the number
of high school volunteers that we have had over the years and we feel that they
have provided a large benefit to the organization. We set up a group on the Facebook website to help with this
effort (parents are welcome to join) and are developing ads that will specifically
appeal to high school students looking for community service. We feel that the THinc Money program will give us a competitive advantage over
other volunteer organizations as we are offering volunteers not only a way to
give back and receive community service credits, but also information that they
can use themselves. The increase
in high school volunteers will directly drive our ability to increase the
enrollment in our core math tutoring program. Our third major initiative will be to further our support
for tutors by designating lead tutors.
Lead tutors will have additional responsibilities such as mentoring new
tutors, developing the weekly games and providing feedback for improvements to
our program. This should help
provide additional support to lesser-experienced tutors while fostering a
stronger culture among the tutors. Parent Testimonials (Names changed to protect the individuals)
In our end of year reviews of Top Honors by parents, we added a fill-in section for parents to describe any changes (good or bad) in attitude, performance, etc. that they observed in their children since joining our math tutoring program. We were delighted by the glowing feedback, and would like to share a few of those comments here: When my child entered Top Honors, she was basically about
to fail math. Through the
fundamentals, one on one tutoring and professional structuring on Top Honors,
my child is now in the math honors program in her school. She is now advanced. That was bestowed upon her at Top
Honors. He made progress in the math tutoring. That he made an effort to wake up every
[Saturday] morning to attend is good.
Excellent. Top Honors has given Jen the confidence I felt she
needed. She now takes her time
more. I still believe it begins
with the teacher. When the work is
explained in a way that the child gets it, they can achieve. Jen has scored higher on her assessment
test this year! A+ improvement. Top Honors is a wonderful free tutoring service that I
was very happy to have my son involved in. He was taught some math that he did not know. My son has learned to have more
patience and has gained a little more confidence in math. The staff and tutors at Top Honors were
always courteous and polite. They
got to know my son on a first name basis and were very friendly to me as a
parent. My child really loves math and he was having a problem
with some math concepts; but, after a year of tutoring with Top Honors, he is
more confident in answering questions in school. He went from getting 75s to 85s and 90s. My child has developed more confidence when doing math
problems. Now she does more
homework alone instead of asking me to help her. Also, she is able to connect her math skills into other
everyday tasks. I will definitely
consider bringing her back next year. We look forward to another exciting year at Top Honors! Glenn Turtel Chairman of the Board |