Specifically, S2A, maximizes school resources and supports teachers by focusing on:
- Attendance
- Attitudes
- Academic Achievement
1. Problem(s) addressed
Today’s educators are under increasing pressure to prepare a more diverse student population for an ever changing world. To further complicate the task, resources grow tighter as demands grow stronger.
At S2A we know your passion, as an educator - to see every student achieve his potential. While you seek to narrow the achievement gaps among your students you are flooded with unproven programs which are long on promises and short on results. We are proud to offer a program where the people behind the ‘wheel’ have been doing the same thing since 1991with unprecedented success.
S2A complements the secondary education with a proven approach to:
✓ Improving Attendance (Reducing Truancy problems)
✓ Lowering Discipline Referrals
✓ Raising Academic Achievement
2. Methodology
Meeting one hour per week with each team, Academic Coaches follow a carefully designed curriculum. By addressing attendance first, foremost and always, students slowly become aware of the importance of being responsible for their own actions.
From attendance to communication with their teachers, S2A provides a system of accountability in which the students come to respect and respond to with pride. Over time the relationships between team members and their Academi
c
Coach become the highest level of accountability and create a level of
trust which is essential to achievement in life - as well as academia.Finally, students are rewarded for their new found successes through a points system created to motivate continued improvement. The comprehensive approach of S2A typically produces a very high success rate - 85-90% effectiveness - for getting struggling students off the ‘F’ list and into the graduation line.
3. Perfect Match
As an award winning program, S2A offers schools the perfect plug-in for Tier 2 - Targeted Intervention - as part of a Response to Intervention (RtI) framework. RtI identifies and provides tiered interventions for students at risk of academic failure because they significantly lag the performance of their peers or because their learning rate is significantly less than peers.
S2A takes a Positive Behavior Support (PBS) - type philosophy and structure to the individual level. The Academic Coach works with teams of students to prevent behavior from causing academic failure. An individual remediation plan, if needed, is established based on:
✓ skill gaps,
✓ behavioral issues (e.g., not turning in homework, skipping class),
✓ opportunities for positive reinforcement by teachers, peers, and self,
✓ individually designed rewards and consequences, and
✓ community role models (e.g., Olympic athletes).
PBS establishes a positive environment for learning for all students in all parts of the school campus. S2A addresses and changes individual student behaviors as a part of the continuous team reinforcement process.
". . . our school benefited measurably in several ways as a result of this program. First, the students tended to stay in school rather than drop out. Second, we documented significant improvement in the academic achievements of the students in the program. Finally, we saw improved attitudes among the students as they progressed through the training provided . . ." Jill L. Martin, Ed. D., Principal, Liberty High School, Colorado Springs, CO, NASSP National High School Principal of the Year, 2007,