Children experiencing foster care face some of the largest educational opportunity gaps of any group of students in Massachusetts — and these disparities can have lifelong effects.
Our newest program, RISE (Readiness • Inquiry • Scholarship • Education), is a first-of-its-kind approach that is specially-designed to meet the unique needs of students in grades K-3 who are experiencing foster care.
Through a combination of personalized, one-on-one tutoring and caregiver support, RISE provides children with the building blocks they need to become strong readers and writers.
✔ Increasing Access: Too often, tutoring and education support programs inadvertently exclude children experiencing foster care. RISE is home-based, so it moves with students, even if they change foster care placements or schools.
✔ Providing High-Impact Tutoring: Students engage in tutoring sessions designed to meet their unique strengths and needs. RISE tutors use a custom-designed curriculum that is backed by research. They cover all of the key building blocks of early literacy — from phonics, to vocabulary, to reading comprehension, and more.
✔ Taking a Holistic Approach: RISE tutors embed social-emotional supports into lessons and use activity-based learning that incorporates each child’s interests so they’re motivated to learn.
✔ Supporting Caregivers: We work to ensure all caregivers in a child’s life — such as foster parents, biological parents, and kinship caregivers — are equipped with the knowledge and tools necessary to advocate for their child’s educational needs and support learning at home and at school.
✔ Building Bridges: Our RISE team coordinates services and promotes information-sharing among families, schools, the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families (DCF), and other service providers.
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