#NYC students who need reading tutors may be out of luck

Big Apple public school kids in need of reading tutors may be out of luck this school year thanks to the Department of Education’s beleaguered background check system, a fuming non-profit organization told The Post.

Go Pass, the DOE-run background check service that screens all volunteers, requires the unpaid workers to get fingerprinted at their Downtown Brooklyn facility but is yet to come up with a pandemic-friendly appointment system, according to Reading Partners, a non-profit that provides free reading tutors.

“The new platform… essentially has no appointments available,” Rhea Quinones, Reading Partner’s community manager, told The Post. “We have this looming problem, which is we’re going to need new volunteers to get started and Go Pass is a mess.”

The non-profit group, which provides crucial one-on-one tutoring services to K-5 kids at 18 Title I schools, where low-income families make up at least 40% of enrollment, said unlike years past, appointments for fingerprints are being released at random.

Volunteers have to check the website everyday in the hopes of scheduling an appointment, which may be available that same day or the following day, leaving hundreds of potential tutors in a state of limbo, the group said.

“I asked [our Go Pass contact] to clarify how are you setting these appointments, is there going to be any rhyme or reason… and there was no response to that,” Quinones said.

“So we still don’t have any sense of how to anticipate when dates are going to be available except to just ‘check back often, they’re usually made available the next day,’ ” she continued.

“[That’s] just not useful for a large group of volunteers who need to be background checked, who need to get to a specific location in Downtown Brooklyn who may live in the South Bronx, who may live in south Jamaica, who may live in East New York… we’re very concerned about when it’s time to bring these new volunteers on how we’ll do that in a significant way.”

The group has repeatedly asked the DOE if they can switch over to a comparable, private vendor — that they say can do the same work for cheaper and just as effectively — but they’ve refused.

The DOE did not immediately return a request for comment.

The organization said their reading tutors, many of whom are former teachers, are more important than ever because kids are facing enormous educational gaps amid remote learning and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Those gaps are even higher among black and brown students and kids from low-income families.

“It feels like the DOE is getting in its own way of helping the children that they are supposed to serve,” Quinones said.

Reading Partners pointed to projections released by the consulting company McKinsey & Company that found overall, kids could face 6.8 months of learning loss as a result of the pandemic. Black students could face 10.3 months of learning loss, Hispanic kids could face 9.2 months and low-income learners overall could face 12.4 months of loss.

“The education system alone will not catch these kids up or will not be able to give them the tools and resources they need need to be confident readers,” said Jennifer Hardwood, Reading Partner’s executive director.