Everything was going well. A district curriculum leader was walking trustees in a northern Michigan school district through Section 35p of the Michigan School Aid Act.
The funding was welcome, but one rule stopped staff in their tracks. According to the rules of the High Impact Tutoring grant that’s attached to the legislation, districts can get tutoring help for students’ early literacy needs, but those tutors have to come from an outside partner, and MDE’s template letter of support requires the district commit to dedicated tutoring time within the school day.
This particular district had already spent two years building its Tier 2 system. More than 30 people deliver intervention across its 11 elementary schools, using shared programs and shared data, with one district lead who keeps them calibrated. Why should they bring outside people into the building during the day when the district has already hired the staff?
If you’re deciding whether to sign a 35p letter of support, you may be asking the same thing. The answer lies in how districts plan now to make the most of tutoring funds when they arrive.
Do it right, and tutors can help districts reach students that existing staff can’t get to, supplementing classroom instruction rather than replacing it, and helping read gains take off.
Not every district has a system like this one. Some have a single interventionist covering several buildings. Others are still choosing a screener ahead of the state’s K–12 Literacy and Dyslexia Law 2027 deadline. For those districts, 35p tutoring can be the steady Tier 2 support some students haven’t had yet.
What section 35p asks of your district
35p pays an outside partner to tutor your students, and your district supplies the schedule and the fiscal paperwork. Here is what that means in practice.
| Requirement | What it means for districts |
|---|---|
| Eligible partner | Each application has exactly one tutoring partner from MDE’s eligible list. A district can join more than one application. |
| Who applies | The partner writes most of the application. A district or ISD submits it in NexSys as fiscal agent, with a signed superintendent letter of support from each partnering district. |
| Who tutorsKey for your staff | The partner provides the tutors. Grant funds can’t pay your own teachers to tutor your own students. |
| Format | In-person by default, before, during, or after school. No more than four students per tutor, at least two sessions a week. |
| Virtual | Allowed with a waiver. The partner must show evidence for the virtual program it will deliver, and payment runs through an outcomes-based contract. |
| Curriculum | The partner must support your district’s curriculum and use a structured, evidence-based tutoring curriculum with formative assessment. |
| SchedulingKey for your staff | Tutoring during the day needs dedicated time outside Tier 1 instruction. |
| PA 146 | Section 35p tutoring can count as PA 146 intervention if it meets the law’s requirements, including a current IRIP for each student. |
| Money and timing | $44.4 million for high-impact tutoring grants. Budgets start no earlier than March 2027, and funds must be spent by September 30, 2028. |
How to make 35p high-impact tutoring work for your students
Whether your district has a mature Tier 2 system or is still putting one together, the student support that districts can access with the 35p high-impact tutoring grant is a chance to give more students regular, focused help with the exact skills they’re missing. Getting the most out of it comes down to four areas: who the tutors serve, when tutoring happens, how it connects to your curriculum, and what your team does with the data.
Take pressure off your interventionists
Picture a 1st grader reading below the 35th percentile on oral reading fluency. She works with a building interventionist for 30 minutes, three days a week.
Now picture four of her classmates who are all reading below the 50th percentile. They need help too, but your interventionist doesn’t have room on her roster for another student.
A 35p tutor gives those four students regular, focused practice on the skills they’re missing, and your interventionist keeps her time for the 1st grader and the other readers who need her the most.
To get that relief, decide which students the tutors will serve before you choose a partner. Most districts choose one of two models.
Pick one tutoring model per grade band
Reach more students
Who the tutors serve
Students just above your Tier 2 cutoff, or students in buildings short on interventionist hours
Your interventionist’s role
Stays focused on the students who need a specialist most
A good fit when
Your interventionists’ rosters are full and students are waiting
Add a daily dose
Who the tutors serve
Students already in Tier 2
Your interventionist’s role
Keeps the instructional lead, and tutoring adds practice
A good fit when
Students in Tier 2 need more practice to close the gap
Whichever you choose, name it in your 35p application. Skip this step, and tutors can end up doubling up on students who already have an interventionist while others keep waiting.
Still building your Tier 2 team? The relief is even bigger. If you have one or two interventionists, or none in some buildings, tutors can carry Tier 2 for the students your screener flags while your staff focus on the students who need them most. Decide up front which students the tutors own, so no student falls into the gap between them.
Give students extra practice on what your core literacy program teaches
A 1st grader meets the vowel team ai in her classroom lesson. With her teacher’s help she can read rain, but on her own she reads it as “ran.” Over the next few weeks, her tutor comes back to ai in nearly every session, first in single words and then in sentences and short decodable stories. By the end of the unit, she’s reading paint and train in a new story without stopping to sound out every letter, and her teacher hears the difference in small group.
That’s what happens when tutoring aligns with your core curriculum. Students need many repetitions before a new pattern sticks, and each tutoring session adds more of them on the exact skill they’re learning in class, instead of a separate lesson they have to fit in somewhere.
Make Tier 2 decisions with more data and less legwork
It’s the six-week check-in for a 2nd grader in Tier 2. Your team has three progress monitoring scores, and they’re flat. Is the intervention not working, or did she just have a rough few weeks?
Now add the tutor’s progress monitoring data from 18 sessions. They show she’s mastered closed syllables and keeps stalling on r-controlled vowels. Your team doesn’t have to guess anymore. That afternoon, her tutor shifts the focus to r-controlled vowels.
Help your teachers reach every student
After the core lesson, K-3 teachers are often expected to run small, differentiated groups during the intervention block. In a 1st grade classroom, those groups can span five skill levels, from letter names and letter sounds through CVC words, blends, and r-controlled vowels.
There isn’t time to see every group every day, and a child in a group of six can go quiet and let others answer, and even engaged kids get practice aimed at the middle of the group, with only a few turns to read aloud. On-level readers get independent work because they’re “fine,” and a chance to move them ahead slips by.
This is where a lot of Tier 1 investment quietly leaks away. Most district leaders we talk to say some version of the same thing: “We’ve invested heavily in Tier 1, but we’re still not seeing the growth.”
Use Section 35p tutoring to change that. A tutor works one-to-one with the students who need the most foundational practice for 15 minutes of that same block, five days a week, and each one reads aloud on the exact skill they need. With fewer groups to rotate through, your teacher can work with the rest of her class more often and finally have room to push her on-level readers forward.
Two more decisions to make before the grant application
- Name one district owner. When a student misses three tutoring sessions in a row, someone needs to find out why. When a principal wants to move tutoring to the afternoon, someone needs to make the call. A single district contact who owns the schedule and the data means those questions get answered in a day instead of a month, and tutors spend their time tutoring.
- Start with a few buildings and learn as you go. The district in that study session rolls out every new program with an early-adopter group first. As one curriculum leader put it, you don’t know what you don’t know until you actually do the thing. High-impact tutoring works the same way. Launch in a few buildings this spring, and ask your team what’s working and what can be improved. By next fall, you can expand with a schedule and a data routine you’ve already tested.
Where this leaves your district
Back in that Northern Michigan district study session, leaders ended the night with a wish list they estimated at about $3 million. Section 35p won’t pay for all of it.
What it can pay for is a tutor working with those 1st graders who were waiting for a spot on the interventionist’s roster, 15 minutes a day, one-to-one, every day of the week, starting this spring and running through next school year.
