District 99 has chosen not to renew its subscription to Paper.co Tutoring; a decision that hasn’t been very highly disputed by students of either DGS or DGN. With so few students who truly used the service, it was hard for Associate Superintendent Gina Ziccardi to justify such a steep price of $173,256.20 or $36.90 per student.

“We did two major pushes. You know, trying to get more kids to use it, and like I said, I mean, by the time we got to April of last year, we were really down in sessions,” Ziccardi said.

The sessions that Ziccardi spoke of included either an essay revision or chat help. Ziccardi spoke about wanting to see students use Paper.co of their free will rather than simply for a required English class essay revision.

“I wanted to see kids who used it at least four times and we ended up with just between five and 600 [total sessions],” Ziccardi said.

The initial analysis of Paper.co as an underutilized resource held true since less than 15% of the student population continued to use it throughout the month of April compared to “roughly 3,500” sessions in the first six months according to Ziccardi.

With being back in person, Ziccardi sees Paper.co tutoring being replaced by in-school resources such as increased office hours and access periods which is an advantage of the new schedule.

“Last year, when we had some of those different schedules, teachers had office hours, but a lot of the time they might have been virtual… and my thought with that is that kids might be more inclined to see their teacher if it was in person,” Ziccardi said.

During the period of time when students had access to Paper.co, some English classes mandated running any essay they had by tutors on Paper.co to increase student engagement with the service. Senior Madeleine Kelly speaks on her experience with using Paper.co for essay comments.

“I thought it was kind of helpful, [the separate tutors] gave me different stuff to work on every time, like I went through it three times, and I was like, that’s kind of not really helpful,” Kelly said.

Students are encouraged to utilize resource centers and office hours to answer questions they may have.