Integration of Safety, Equity and Cohesion

Maintaining student safety should be a top priority for any tutoring program. Programs must ensure they are following local, state, and federal laws to ensure student safety, as well developing the capacity in staff and tutors to create a safe environment for students. Throughout this toolkit, you will find tools designed to support tutoring programs with ensuring student safety, from guidance for conducting background checks on prospective tutors to best practices for online tutoring and ensuring student data privacy. See the Tool Appendix to find particular tools that highlight specific aspects of student safety.

Tutoring programs should work toward equitable outcomes for students. Therefore, decisions regarding access and participation should be rooted in equity. Throughout this toolkit, you will find tools designed to help programs put equity at the center of their practices. Equity requires individuals at all levels of the tutoring organization to critically examine their own biases and work together to create actively inclusive environments.

All sections of the toolkit are designed to prioritize equity, whether in the foundational choices of program design, by selecting qualified tutors who reflect diverse communities, through providing training and support related to cultural competency, when determining data measures and collecting feedback from students and their families, or through providing rigorous and accessible instruction to all students. The work of striving for equity is never done, so we seek to keep updating our tools and resources to help programs embody equity in their decisions.

Cohesion refers to both the innovative leadership and high quality execution required to have a well-run organization as well as the alignment of a tutoring program design with its vision and mission. In the Program Focus section of the toolkit, you will find resources to conduct a community landscape analysis, develop a value proposition grounded in equity, and ensure that the program’s practices are aligned with its vision. Throughout the toolkit, tools consistently refer back to programs’ Model Dimensions, providing insight into how their guidance might apply to different programs differently depending on their design decisions. Some tools have been specifically crafted to support programs with specific Model Dimensions. Tools are also interlinked across sections, making it easier to identify ahead of time when a program team’s actions and practices in one aspect of their work will shape (and be shaped by) their decisions and choices in another. Specific organizational leadership and execution tools will be available in tool updates.