Helping students who are struggling in school shouldn’t just be the responsibility of individual teachers—it should be a building-wide mission.
That belief motivates two recent winners of the Milken Educator Award, a recognition for early- to mid-career teachers, principals, and other educators that comes with $25,000 in prize money.
Jaime Garcia, the dean of academics at LISA Academy North Middle-High School in North Little Rock, Ark., and Jaclyn Lennox, the assistant principal of curriculum and instruction at Bolingbrook High School in Valley View Community School District 365U outside of Chicago, are two of the 23 honorees for the 2025-26 award year.
Both have worked to create school structures that offer academic support, without isolating students or singling them out from their peers. It’s a need that’s especially acute now.
More than five years out from the initial school closures of the COVID pandemic, the effects of those disruptions on student learning continue to reverberate through the U.S. education system.
A nationwide effort to stand up tutoring programs and expand summer school has offered mixed results, with many districts seeing little to no movement in average student achievement. On national tests, students’ math and reading scores have stagnated at historic lows—or in some cases, continued to fall.
Lennox and Garcia spoke with Education Week about how they have expanded academic support in their buildings.
Jaime Garcia: When students support each other, ‘we learn a lot as teachers’
Before Garcia became the dean of academics at LISA Academy North Middle High School, he was a math teacher.
Sometimes, Garcia would see the same students several times as they passed from 6th through 12th grade. He started to identify teenagers who had a strong grasp of the concepts and could explain them well to others. Once, he remembered, one of his students taught the class a faster way of finding the midpoint between two coordinates—a method that Garcia hadn’t thought of.
“I knew that we could use support from older kids to support our middle school students,” Garcia said.
Garcia launched a math mentorship program at the school, tapping high schoolers to work with small groups of three or four middle schoolers during lessons. They meet in classrooms or scatter out into the hallways.
“The older kids might share how they wish they could have had some topics presented in a different way,” Garcia said. “Whenever you hear students talk or explain things among themselves, we learn a lot as teachers.”
Mentors can also convince younger students why doing well in the an academic subject matters. That approach tends to be more effective than teacher cajoling might be on its own, he said: “They can share their experiences about how the fundamental skills are very important for higher level math courses.”
Jaclyn Lennox: ‘They deserve the same opportunities as anyone else’
About a decade ago at Bolingbrook, students who had failed several classes used to attend lessons at a school-within-a-school—an alternative program focused on credit recovery that was housed on the same campus, but was a separate institution on paper.
“That limited students’ access, because they had to un-enroll at Bolingbrook, and be at a different school. There weren’t electives for those kids,” Lennox said.
Lennox helped the school transition to a different model: an Academic Recovery Center that students could attend for a class period during the day. There, students who have failed a course can work through an online credit recovery program with support from a teacher, while still taking college-preparatory classes in other subjects, as well as electives.
Online credit recovery programs are common in U.S. schools: Almost 7 in 10 high schools allow students to use them to retake failed classes. The programs can boost graduation rates, but critics have argued that they can allow students to pass without mastering the material or further disengage students from learning.
But integrating credit recovery into the school day has allowed for more hands-on, subject-specific support from teachers, and helped target students who could benefit more precisely, said Lennox—both practices that experts say can make credit recovery programs stronger.
The shift has also erased some of the stigma that students had faced in the past, Lennox said. “They’re Bolingbrook High School students, and they deserve the same opportunities as anyone else.”
