A recent article in the News & Observer said that officials from the Wake County Public School System (WCPSS) are blaming the federal funding freeze for delaying the return of a tutoring program that helps students improve their reading skills.
A little digging revealed that last year, WCPSS paid nonprofits approximately $339,000 to operate and recruit teachers for an intensive tutoring program in Wake County. This year, WCPSS is hoping to attract more than 230 tutors to the project aimed at providing tutoring for K–3 students.
Assuming this year’s tutoring program would be similarly sized, $339,000 — or thereabouts — seems like a modest investment for a district with 160,000 students and a budget of over $2.2 billion dollars. The truth is that the expenditure is considerably less than 1 percent of the WCPSS budget.
Why should WCPSS resume the program? Students everywhere continue to struggle with learning loss. Although 2024 end-of-grade test scores for WCPSS haven’t been publicly released yet, recent state test results show that only 46.6 percent of students in third grade achieved proficiency in reading — down a full two percentage points (48.6 percent) from last year. Even if WCPSS students score at slightly higher proficiency rates than students statewide, the percentage lacking proficiency is still unacceptably high.
From 2020 to 2025, WCPSS received $434.2 million in federal funding for Covid relief. Federal legislation required that 20 percent of these funds be spent to address learning loss. For WCPSS, that should have amounted to about $87 million dollars.
How did WCPSS spend its Covid funding? Sixty-two percent of the funds were spent on salaries, 14 percent on employee benefits, 9 percent on purchased services, 12 percent on supplies and materials, and 3 percent on other expenses.
Spending on salaries for tutors and tutorial pay specifically totaled about $660,000 — less than 0.2 percent.
Recent test scores underscore the need for more one-on-one tutoring to remedy learning loss and improve student test results. For some time, the consensus among researchers has been that intensive tutoring is the best way to remedy learning loss (see here, here, and here). Despite the need, available resources, and its own rhetoric, the efforts of WCPSS to provide high-quality tutoring to the thousands of students who need it have been sorely lacking.
WCPSS owes students a tutoring program and parents and taxpayers an explanation.
