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Wayland High’s academic support center serves about 105 students; coordinator outlines staffing, data and interventions
Summary
Academic support coordinator Amy Lima told the School Committee the center supports roughly 105 scheduled students (about 13% of the high school) with a mix of scheduled blocks, drop-in help, subject intervention teachers and peer tutors, and described staffing and demographic breakdowns.
Amy Lima, academic support coordinator at Wayland High School, presented an overview of the Academic Support Center on March 12, describing its purpose, referral pathways, staffing and the populations it serves.
Lima told the committee the center is a regular‑education intervention (not special education) that mixes scheduled blocks for students with drop‑in availability. “Most students start with four [blocks],” she said, explaining an average of 4.73 blocks per scheduled student and a typical range from one block per cycle to much higher in rare cases.
Lima provided a snapshot of current enrollment and demographics: 105 students are currently scheduled for academic support (about 13% of the high school population). Of those, 47 are ninth graders (about 25% of the ninth grade cohort), 30 are tenth graders, 21 are juniors and eight are seniors. Peer tutoring involved roughly 40–50 students during the school year.
She described common reasons students use the center: the largest needs are executive‑functioning skills, study strategies, and help catching up on missing work. Lima said the center proactively receives referrals from eighth‑grade teams, teachers, counselors, families and students themselves; she also reviews school‑wide grade data to identify students who may be missing from intervention.
On staffing, Lima said the center is run by a coordinator (her role) and a certified classroom teacher; historically teaching assistants supported supervision, but the district moved toward a certified teacher model to provide direct instruction. Subject intervention staffing for 2024–25 was described as roughly 0.5 FTE English, 0.6 FTE math, 0.25 FTE science and 0.2 FTE history, with those allocations shifting year to year based on course sections and needs.
Committee members praised the program’s proactive design. One member asked about measurable impact; Lima said many students are scheduled early (start of ninth grade) which reduces the ability to show a clear before/after outcome for intervention, but she emphasized that numbers decrease by grade level as students gain independence.
The committee asked for Lima’s slides to be posted to the committee folder for broader access; administrators agreed to share the presentation.
Why this matters: the Academic Support Center is a primary regular‑education intervention for Wayland High School students who are not on Individualized Education Programs; it targets students with executive‑functioning and study‑skill needs and reaches notable shares of METCO and low‑income students, per Lima’s data.
