March President’s Message
Now that I’ve served as the president of CLASP for eight months, I’m beginning to appreciate how much goes on behind the scenes to keep CLASP organized and running - things beyond operating sites and tutoring students. A short list includes publicity, tutor recruitment and support, enrichment activities for students, grant writing, fund raising, financial management, and technology.
And that’s not all. The staff and board members have been busy behind the scenes working on several extra projects to make CLASP a better organization. With help from our communications consultant, Lisa Strom, we are about to go live with a new version of our website that ultimately will have more extensive information, including more resources for tutors. During the fall months we launched a cloud-based system called Child Pilot that makes things like emergency contact information available at a fingertip. The big notebook sitting in the office that contained pages of information about each family and student is gone. If we need demographic statistics for a grant application—boom, a report can be completed instantly. The quality improvement project in partnership with the school district is pilot testing a process we will use in the future to set and monitor goals for each student.
So, what’s next? The board met recently to plan our goals for the spring. Keeping a focus on student safety is the top priority. Our site supervisors are already trained to ensure on-going student safety. This includes being mandated reporters of abuse, neglect, or other situations that compromise safety. Now we will be upgrading our procedures for clearing adult volunteers. More information about the plan for this will follow. Next, we need to be even more strategic in recruiting and supporting tutors. We need more community tutors both to substitute when people are ill or on vacation, and to expand the program to a greater number of students.
It's getting to be the time when our nominating committee starts searching for people in the community who can help us accomplish these goals. If you (or someone you know) would like to contribute some time and talent, we need you. While these activities may sound exhausting, really they are tremendously exciting. The conversations and interactions I have with the student I tutor at Wheeler Park make it all worthwhile. Time to get in on the fun! Write me at: president@clasp4kids.org.