School on Wheels delivers tutoring – and hope – for homeless students

School districts in Washington State are required to identify students experiencing homelessness and enroll them into a state program in which the district pays for the students' transportation and covers the cost of other necessities with allotted federal funds.

Facing competition from urban schools, a rural school in Lithuania is taking an alternative approach to teaching. The school has shifted its instruction to be student-centric and address individual student's needs, dividing students based on performance, and assigning tutors to focus on social needs. The school has achieved a ranking of 58th place in the country, scoring higher than many larger city schools.

In order to deal with the opioid crisis, schools in Massachusetts are hiring counselors to support teachers and their students. In Cape Cod alone, 17 schools hired outside counselors, while 50 schools throughout the state did the same. The schools that are offering these services reported improvements in academic performance. "Their day runs smoother. They can get out their anxiety while they're in school instead of bottling it up, and then go back to class and continue learning.”

Elementary, middle, secondary, and alternative schools are partnering with the nonprofit Elev8 Baltimore to provide enrichment programs for students after school. The nonprofit’s aim is to keep students away from danger and crime by keeping them in school buildings, so the programs are tailored to student interests at each school.

Schools in Mesa, Arizona, are using the team teaching model to boost teacher morale and fill gaps in staff. The model allows teachers to work together to teach a large group of students in one big classroom rotating between one-on-one instruction, small groups, and large-group lectures.

Teachers are practicing dual-language immersion by teaching content in English and the student's native tongue to help prevent loss of fluency in their first language while learning the new one.

World Relief Durham hosts a summer program for kids. Like other summer programs, it is meant to reduce summer learning loss—but this is specifically for children from forcibly displaced families. The kids face unique challenges in school and in society, often having been witness to traumatic experiences, so in this program they take lessons, play games, and work with community volunteers to let them just be kids. The program started with 25 participants in 2017 and grew to serve 150 children in 2019.

City Cuts is a special barbershop in Kutztown, PA that, in addition to being a barbershop, is simultaneously running an internationally-acclaimed literacy program for kids. Barber Jon Escueta gives young clients $3 to read a book aloud to him during their haircut for a program he calls Books for Kids, which boosts confidence in public speaking and literacy. When a video of a client reading to a City Cuts barber went viral, Books for Kids starting receiving hundreds of donations of money and books from around the world, and the kids themselves love and respect the program as well.

A school in Brooklyn uses a lottery-based acceptance system to ensure a diverse class. And instead of sorting the struggling kids from the gifted, they embedded an honors program which kids can opt into without changing classrooms.

The Aspirations Incubator supports rural Maine communities in creating youth mentoring programs using the Trekkers approach. The incubator gives organizations $600,000 over six years, plus extensive training in fostering belonging and developing leadership. Rather than replicating a one-size-fits-all program, each community develops an authentic program suited to local needs. A study tracking the first cohort of students from 7th grade through high school graduation showed they attended school more often, performed better academically, and enrolled in college at higher rates.