Wake schools will make it easier for families to get tutoring from teachers
Updated June 20 with final adoption of policy.
Wake County has made it easier for teachers to be paid by parents to provide tutoring and other services to students.
The school system’s teachers are have been prevented from being paid to tutor any students at the school where they work. But the school board gave final approval June 20 to a revision that narrows the ban to only cover students who are currently in the teacher’s class.
“The major change really here is the current policy is limited to students who are not in the same school as the employee,” A.J. Muttillo, Wake’s assistant superintendent of human resources, told board members. “This proposed revision here will allow employees to tutor a student who is at the same school, provided they’re not currently teaching or serving that student.”
The changes come at a time when students in Wake and across the nation are recovering from learning losses experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Board members said the policy change would be welcomed by families who are looking for help from teachers they know.
“I really appreciate the adjustment in policy,” board member Cheryl Caulfield said at a recent policy committee meeting. “I think that it just really opens up a lot more possibilities.”.
Avoiding showing favoritism
Wake’s long-running ban against teachers being paid by families to tutor students at schools where they work is based on avoiding conflicts of interest.
“The focus really here is about not giving extra access, extra privilege, extra favoritism to those who are able to pay for that,” Kendra Hill, senior director of employee relations, told the board’s policy committee in May. “(We’re) not saying that’s what our teachers would do, but we want to remove the perception, the possibility.”
Muttillo told the board they can update the policy while still avoiding issues of favoritism.
“We found we were pretty restrictive with saying that the student had to be at a completely different school,” Muttillo said.
The old policy would be expanded to cover other services that teachers and other school employees might be paid to provide, such as babysitting.
“A teacher providing childcare would be permitted to do that, but not for students in that teacher’s class,” Hill said.
Policy exceptions
The existing policy allowed for exceptions such as if a teacher is being paid by the district to tutor or if a third-party such as the YMCA hired the employee to work in an after-school program.
The old policy also provided an exception where an instrumental music teacher could get written permission “in extenuating circumstances” to be paid to tutor students in their classes.
The updated policy allows the district to approve exceptions in other subjects “if there are no other available resources in the local community to provide tutoring or other services to the student or if it would deny the students an educational opportunity.”
Some restrictions still remain in place, such as employees not being allowed to tutor for pay in their private capacity on school property. They also wouldn’t be allowed to use school supplies such as their district-issued laptop computer in those private sessions.
But students can bring their district-issued computer to those private tutoring sessions.
This story was originally published May 29, 2023 at 6:00 AM with the headline "Wake schools will make it easier for families to get tutoring from teachers."
