Since its conception in 2016, the mission of Student Academic Support (SAS) has been to provide academic support to the students of Bellingham Christian School as they endeavor to succeed independently in the classroom. The program was born out of our school’s desire to be equipped to provide students from any academic background with high-quality education.

When the program began in 2016 services were extended to a single family. At the close of the 2017-2018 school year, eleven students were enrolled in SAS. I was hired as SAS Director in March 2018 and today we have thirty-two individualized support plans in place.

At the core of SAS are four certified teachers who facilitate one-on-one and small group learning opportunities. In reality, our SAS team extends well beyond this small group of teachers. Parents, administrators, classroom teachers, and students themselves work together to promote student academic growth.

Each K-8 Support Plan focuses on either math or language arts. Classroom teachers, our Director of Learning, and myself put our heads together to select classroom intervention techniques, target skills, and student accommodations. More often than not, elementary SAS students receive two 30 minute sessions of one-on-one time with a tutor each week and middle school SAS students receive support during two class periods each week.

During a given SAS session, students focus on their target skills. One component of Student Academic Support that makes it especially effective is that goals are different for each student. Some students focus on learning academic content. Other SAS students practice organizational techniques, striving to wrap their minds around information and pen their own incredible thoughts on paper. Whether the focus is on the writing process, reading comprehension, math problem-solving, or fact fluency, student’s goals are catered specifically to his or her needs. At the midpoint and end of each semester, I show parents a summary of their child’s progress. Target skills are revisited every nine weeks and adjusted as necessary.

With individualized goals, SAS students are not given extra coursework on top of their other classwork. Instead, SAS teachers work closely with grade-level teachers to ensure that SAS students are supported as they complete class assignments. If a student’s target skills are reading fluency and spelling, he or she may take a class reading assignment, read aloud to the SAS teacher, and identify/discuss spelling words in the passage. Perhaps a student’s focus is organizing information and working at appropriate pace during math. He or she may be given strategies to structure math assignments and held accountable for work completion. The goal of SAS is not to provide an isolated learning experience, but to support students as they endeavor to succeed independently in the classroom.