A partnership between Seymour Community School Corp. and the Boys and Girls Club of Seymour has been helping kids regain education lost during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Ryon Wheeler, executive director of the Boys and Girls Club, attended the Seymour school board meeting May 10 to provide an update on the tutoring program and thank the corporation for its involvement.

“We received a House Bill 1008 Student Learning Recovery Grant, which really focuses on helping kids who experienced learning loss during COVID by being home and being quarantined,” Wheeler said. “We are trying to get funds out to community-based organizations to ensure the kids are getting help.”

The grant program, created in 2021, allocates $150 million to support accelerated learning for Indiana’s students in the areas of literacy, mathematics and college and career readiness.

Through the grant, Indiana is supporting community organizations, education service centers, higher education institutions and K-12 schools across 86 of Indiana’s 92 counties.

Wheeler said the $418,724 in grant funds the club received has been paying for the curriculum, but a large chunk of the money pays for the 16 to 18 teachers who have been coming to the club, using the same curriculum they were using in the school system, to help more than 60 kids get intensive tutoring with teachers after school at the club.

“The HB 1008 grant, due to the way the money came out, we were able to extend that grant for another year, and so with the funds available, we should be able to continue that program until Christmas or hopefully to the end of the school year,” Wheeler said. “It’s a one-year school year grant, and we did get an extension to a second year, and it’s our plan to exhaust all those funds as much as we can so we can get kids back up to level.”

Wheeler said they’re getting good results with the teachers there.

“Granted, some of the results are still surface level right now because we’ve only had six to eight months of the program,” he said. “But we had a kid who was in second grade and was starting out the year reading at a kindergarten reading level.”

Wheeler said part of the boy’s problem was motivational, but he got in there and got it done, and they’ve seen huge results with the student’s reading level.

He said the club also received a 21st Century Community Learning Center Grant, which is very similar, taking kids who are behind in reading and math and helping them get to grade level or complete grade level.

The other part of the grant is specialized for STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) education or for what is comparatively less common, lessons pertaining to social-emotional learning.

“We have decided to focus on social-emotional learning because of the mental health issues that are in place coming out of COVID after a lot of kids have been in isolation,” Wheeler said. “A lot of kids are in homes where they unfortunately shouldn’t have been in those homes, but they were stuck there.”

Wheeler said they’ve seen kids regress since the pandemic started, not only in school but socially and emotionally, so they will continue working with Christopher and Associates in Seymour, an outpatient mental health group providing therapy and psychological evaluations to children.

“We will continue working with the school, trying to make sure we close gaps on kids and be very intentional with that versus just suggesting they come over after school,” he said. “We now have an agreement with the school system that we can work with them to identify and target kids who are behind to make sure we can essentially get them in the program to get them up to speed.”

The club has had a program called Indiana Kids for many years that provides free tutoring, mentoring and college and career workshops.

“With that program, our staff can really help with those kids and have helped them get a 15% increase in reading and math proficiency,” Wheeler said. “But some kids that are so far behind, our staff just doesn’t have the skill set, so the certified teachers can work with those kids who need intensive help and get them where they need to be.”

He said the club staff members are not teachers and don’t have a teaching degree, but they can work with the kids when they need a little bit of motivation, while the teachers who are trained can help those kids who need more intensive learning.

“Seymour Community Schools have always been a partner, and the reason is that 25 years ago, we built the club here because the middle school was the transfer hub for the kids,” Wheeler said. “We have a before-school program where you can drop your kids off at the club, and we’ll walk them over to school in the morning and the school provides busing, they provide food with breakfast and lunch in the summertime.”