New York City Department of Education

Monitoring of Supplemental Educational Services Providers (Follow-Up)

Supplemental Educational Services are special federally funded tutoring services that are offered to low-income students at elementary schools, middle schools and high schools where a significant portion of the student population is not meeting certain academic performance goals. The services are to be offered by qualified contractors before or after school or on weekends. In the 2006-07 school year, the New York City Department of Education (DoE) contracted with 108 Supplemental Educational Services providers and paid them about $74 million for their tutoring sessions with more than 55,000 students. In audit report 2007-N-22, we examined whether the payments made to the contractors were accurate and the services were provided in accordance with contract requirements. We found that DoE was at risk of overpaying the providers, because the payments were based on unreliable attendance data that was submitted by the providers. We also found that the size of some tutoring classes exceeded the limits specified in the contracts and not all provider employees working with children had undergone the required criminal background checks. We made numerous recommendations to correct these and other deficiencies in DoE’s monitoring. When we followed up with DoE officials, we found they had made significant progress in correcting the problems we identified in our original report.

For a complete copy of Report 2010-F-38 click here.