EL PASO -- Socorro Independent School District administrators are implementing a new plan to reach at-risk students after the Texas Education Agency learned of a discrepancy in the district's program.
State money, specifically designated for students at risk of dropping out of school, is provided to districts throughout El Paso County.

In Socorro, teachers were required to use their planning period, which was paid for by the state money, to document interventions with at-risk students, but an educator, who did not want to use the planning time for the outreach, complained to the Texas Education Agency.

The agency responded that teachers should not only be documenting interventions with at-risk students but should be providing intense accelerated instruction during that time.

Agency officials asked the district to either redirect the $6 million, which pay 13 percent of a teacher's salary, to other programs or come up with a plan to provide the direct instruction to at-risk students.

"I had a lot of resistance at the beginning, a lot of resistance," Maria Arias, the district's director of state and federal programs, said about the interventions the district was requiring from teachers. "They didn't want to do it because in the past nobody had told them that they had to do anything. They thought that those 45 minutes every day were to do other things, and so they may have been planning as a group, as a team or as a department but not for the at-risk students. Not for  them."

Through the Academic Reinforcement Mentoring Initiative, which was formed by the district, teachers at 24 campuses are now each in charge of monitoring 10 to 16 at-risk students through one of two methods.

About 23 schools are asking teachers to enter another educator's classroom and serve as mentors to students during the planning period.

Montwood High School uses the in-classroom strategy but also allows teachers to pull students out of class to be mentored individually.

Diana Holguin, a sophomore at Socorro High School, said she enjoys having an additional teacher in her classes who serves as a mentor.

"It has been a lot better because each teacher has a different strategy and they can help you by showing you different techniques," Holguin said. "I wasn't struggling that much in school but now I am doing even better. All of our classes should be like this."

Within a 10-day period, the initiative requires teachers to provide intense instruction to at-risk students for 360 minutes and work on planning and outreach for the remaining 90 minutes.

Glenda Hawthorne, president of the Socorro Education Association, said that the legal department of the Texas State Teachers Association is looking into the program and how it is being run.

"We are always for what is beneficial for the students," Hawthorne said. "Our main concern is that it has not been implemented uniformly across the district, and while there are successes, there are some things that do need to be fixed."

The El Paso and Ysleta Independent School Districts, which also offer two conference periods to many teachers, pay for the time through district money and use state compensatory money to pay for at-risk coordinators or other at-risk positions and programs.

Mona Abdelfattah, a biology and integrated physics and chemistry teacher at Socorro High School, said that while the new program did allow less time for teachers to plan, sort through paperwork for students and prepare for lessons, the benefits were easily identified.

"It is great for the students because it gives them more time to work one-on-one with a teacher and get additional reinforcement," Abdelfattah said. "... It helps the students so much that I think many teachers are forgetting about the extra work."

Arias said she has received input from students and teachers who say the initiative is working.

"I am not saying that all teachers have bought into it, no, we still have some that are upset but the fact that they may see others wanting to do it and are now even thinking that this is the best thing for our kids (shows me) that they are going to buy into it or they are going to leave, and it is better that they leave if they don't want to do this," Arias said.

"I'm hoping that they buy into it when they see that it is going to be the best thing for those kids that for many years it seems like we just didn't know who they were and maybe wouldn't make it, wouldn't graduate from high school," Arias said.