New NPSS brief: 320k+ adults join schools to provide essential student supports

The National Partnership for Student Success (NPSS), a collaboration between AmeriCorps, the U.S. Department of Education, and Johns Hopkins’ Everyone Graduates Center, has released findings from the second iteration of its nationally representative survey of school principals. This survey, fielded in spring 2024 by the RAND Corporation, finds that schools have exceeded President Biden’s goal of recruiting 250,000 adults into high-impact support roles by summer 2025 — a target he announced during his 2022 State of the Union address. In the recently released brief, “Meeting a Call to Action: Increasing Evidence-Based, People-Powered Student Supports,” NPSS estimates that nearly 323,000 additional adults have stepped up to provide tutoring, mentoring, success coaching, college and career advising, and wrap-around support between fall 2022 and spring 2024. Additional takeaways from the brief include:

1. The number of adults providing NPSS-aligned services has increased substantially.
   
   During the 2023-2024 school year, the number of adults serving in student support roles increased by an estimated 136,000 individuals, bringing the total to 323,000 additional people in just two-years. High-intensity tutoring saw the most significant growth in people-power, with an additional 64,000 adults serving as tutors. At the school level, 28% of principals reported increasing the number of staff in support roles. This translates to around 24,500 schools increasing the number of adults in evidence-based support roles by an average of 5.5 individuals per school.
    
2. The vast majority of schools increased or maintained student access to tutoring and mentoring.
   
   With increased people-power, 34% of principals reported that more students received high-intensity tutoring and 24% of respondents reported increased access to mentoring in the 2023-2024 school year compared to the previous year. The vast majority of principals also reported being able to maintain the number of students receiving these services from the previous school year, with 63% indicating that tutoring numbers remained unchanged and 70% responding that mentoring figures stayed the same as well.
    
3. There remains an unmet demand for NPSS-aligned supports.
   
   Despite the additional 136,000 adults providing high-impact student supports, roughly a third of principals surveyed indicated that only some students who needed high-intensity tutoring, mentoring, or wraparound services received them. In addition, the demand for these supports is increasing. 38% of principals reported an increased need for wrap-around services, 32% reported an increased demand for high-impact tutoring, and 30% reported an increased demand for mentoring. By comparison, a very small percentage of principals—4 percent or less— reported a decreased need for any of the NPSS-aligned supports compared to the previous year, demonstrating that the demand for these services shows no signs of slowing down in the coming school years.

As schools continue to meet the Biden administration’s call to action, collaboration across sectors will remain key. With only 29% of principals utilizing non-profit partnerships for before- and afterschool support, out-of-school-time programs remain valuable yet largely untapped resources in helping schools carry out these people-powered, evidence-based supports. The Afterschool Alliance, in collaboration with NPSS, highlights this potential as their survey of 1,116 afterschool providers found that in the 2023-2024 school year, 62% of respondents offered at least one of the NPSS-aligned approaches, with mentoring and wrap-around services being the most common. These findings underscore the importance of afterschool programs as essential partners in reaching and supporting more students beyond traditional school hours.