The New Jersey Tutoring Corps, Inc. (NJTC), the newly created statewide public-private educational institution dedicated to providing New Jersey’s K-8 public school students with high-impact tutoring in Math and Literacy, announced today a transformative partnership with BookSmiles to ensure all students participating in the New Jersey tutoring program can receive needed access to books at no cost.  Since its inception, Booksmiles has given more than 2 million books to children living in book deserts throughout New Jersey and surrounding states, providing children with needed after-school learning materials and the ability to create their own personal libraries.  The partnership will also offset approximately $50,000.00 a year, which NJTC has traditionally spent on covering the costs of scholar’s at-home learning materials and books, allowing more funding to go specifically to tutoring.

NJTC was initially established 18 months ago by First Lady Tammy Murphy, and anchor institutions such as the Overdeck Foundation, the Community Foundation of New Jersey, the Tepper Foundation, New Jersey Children’s Foundation, the Prudential Foundation, and the Debra and Kenneth Caplan Foundation, as a needed corrective response to the state’s dramatic learning gaps exacerbated by the pandemic.  In an effort to create a needed statewide focal point for tutoring and drive impact for students across the state,  NJTC has executed a strategic plan in its first full year of operations that has grown the organization from an initial 19 locations in five counties to 79 locations in 18 of New Jersey’s 21 counties; increased its staff from 70 tutors to almost 300, and expanded its service to over 3600 scholars during this school year.   A significant mandate for NJTC’s strategic plan has been to leverage its newly created statewide infrastructure to drive a series of innovative partnerships designed to address core learning challenges across the state.  Just last month, NJTC announced that the United States Department of Labor (U.S. DOL) designated NJTC as a Registered Apprenticeship Pathway (RAP), making it one of the first tutoring programs to receive the approval and allowing the organization to offer its tutors the ability to earn academic credits and assistance to increase the supply of educators in New Jersey schools. 

“NJTC’s partnership with BookSmiles continues our efforts to provide greater opportunity for all New Jersey public school students.  This new relationship will serve scholars who need the support of books in the home while dramatically strengthening our organization and infrastructure,” stated NJTC’s CEO Katherine Bassett.  “Organizations like BookSmiles and NJTC are showing families around the state that New Jersey’s education challenges are being solved right here at home, but we must ensure these solutions are available to every family who needs them.  Forging valuable relationships has been the key to implementing our strategic plan and creating a deeply needed tutoring and training infrastructure within the Garden State.  In about 18 months, we have built our team, continuously vetted and trained our tutors, developed partnerships with school districts throughout the state, and dramatically scaled throughout New Jersey.  In a very short period of time, we are changing the paradigm of how tutoring can best serve our communities, and we are becoming a needed focal point for education development throughout the state.  NJTC and BookSmiles believe every child should be provided with a strong public education system, and together, we plan to help fill voids, drive innovation, and build economies of scale throughout New Jersey.”

“BookSmiles is thrilled to be partnering with New Jersey Tutoring Corps, Inc. and deeply appreciates their leadership and growth in assisting public school students and families in the last year,” stated BookSmiles Founder Larry Abrams.  “To battle the inequity seen in the state’s public education system, we must find ways to work together and scale the clear solutions we have built on the local level, and in the short time of their existence, they have quickly become a powerful and profoundly effective anchor of change in New Jersey.   BookSmiles is focused on a simple but important concept – getting books into the hands of students who need and dream of having a library of their own.  We know firsthand the impact our work has on kids across the state, and we are grateful NJTC has activated us to extend our reach and promote the importance of literacy and learning.”

NJTC co-designs tutoring programs with schools and districts, ensuring that its research-based, evidence-rich program specifically meets the needs of individual partners. NJTC staff members provide responsive, personalized, hands-on instruction aligned to New Jersey state standards. School partners co-design each implementation. Tutors are often embedded throughout classrooms during the school day and receive support from instructional coaches and site coordinators. Tutors may also serve scholars in 30 to 60-minute sessions after school three times per week. The program strives to provide a 1:1 up to 1:3 tutor-to-scholar ratio for each tutoring session, with sessions held two to three times weekly for 30 to 60 minutes with the same tutor working with the same scholars throughout a program cycle.  During the last budget cycle, Senate Majority Leader Teresa Ruiz and Senate Education Committee Chair Vin Gopal led the effort to prioritize funding for NJTC in the FY24 budget, enabling the massive scale of statewide tutoring to grow during the summer months and this school year.