As a tutor and mentor with City Year, you will make a difference in children’s lives and transform schools and communities. City Year Chicago’s service programs include school-based service and community transformation.
As a City Year Chicago corps member, you will respond to the challenges facing public education by providing supports in Attendance, Behavior and Course Performance during the school day in addition to After School Programming.
Attendance Initiative: You will conduct activities that support increased attendance across the whole school as well as move a percentage of students to an improved level of attendance based on off-track indicators.
Activities include:
- VIP Lounge: A very special, invitation only, monthly lunch hosted by your team as a reward for students who have no absences and less than 3 tardies.
- Attendance Rallies: A year-long Perfect Attendance Challenge that starts with a beginning of year rally intended to inspire attendance, culminating with an end of year rally which raffles off a high-end gift to the students with perfect attendance.
- Morning Greeting: Monday-Thursday, your team will welcome students to school, monitoring the area, playing games and talking with students until school starts.
- Attendance Check-Ins: Check-ins are a combination of phone calls home when a focus student is absent accompanied by a follow up conversation when the student returns to school.
Behavior Initiative: You will conduct activities that support whole class behavior, whole school extensions, and move a percentage of off-track students to improved in-school behavior.
Activities Include:
- Behavior Coaching Lunches: You will mentor focus behavior students during their lunch period.
School Specific/PBIS School Initiatives: You will plug into school based behavior initiatives where the administration sees fit. - VIP Lounge: A very special, invitation only, monthly lunch hosted by your team as a reward for students who exhibit good behavior.
- In Class Re-Direction/Re-Focusing: You will spend extra time in class to re-direct negative behavior from focus and all other students.
- Positive Contact Home: You will make at least one positive contact home emphasizing positive behavior choice made by focus students.
- One-on-One Mentoring: You will utilize any opportunity to informally or formally coach students’ behavior in and out of the classroom.
Course Performance Initiative: You will serve in classrooms for up to three hours per day, providing whole class and focus list student support. You will also provide targeted tutoring (1:1 and small group) in English and math, build teacher capacity for differentiated instruction, support students during independent work time and monitor class work completion.
Activities can include any curriculum being used in the school and by the teacher. You will be trained in general strategies for teaching reading and math, and this will be supplemented by weekly formal teacher meetings in addition to as-needed follow up trainings by the math/literacy specialists and City Year.
After School Program: Your team will implement its 6th-8th and 9th grade after school program which includes a homework power hour, push-in assistance to schools’ existing programming, and student interest clubs and enrichment activities. The program fosters youth leadership and development and engages the “hard to reach” demographic of middle and high school youth by allowing them to participate in planning their own activities and programming as a way to keep them invested and committed to attending the City Year after school program.
Polling will take place in September to determine student interest for the second hour of after school. Some club ideas generated by previous polling of 6th-9th graders include:
- Yearbook
- Dance
- Drama
- Foreign Language
- Intramural sports
Clubs will rotate on a quarterly basis in order to engage as many students as possible and maintain interest in the program.
 | In addition to helping schools and students succeed, City Year corps members engage community members and corporate partners in physical service projects such as: - Renovating schools
- Painting murals
- Planting gardens
- Creating playspaces
|