Academic improvement is not easy!

If a middle or high school student has a low grade in one or more classes, what can a parent do?

You can't just say, "do your work!" -- kids often respond to that with anger and excuses.

Plus, your parenting time is precious and you've got enough to do with work, extracurricular activities and other children.

One option is tutoring: if a student is struggling in a class, you can hire a tutor, say for math or chemistry, who can show your child how to get the work done. But think about it: isn't your child supposed to be learning from the teacher?

Direct math tutoring, for example, can help a student start to make sense of what's going on in class. We love it when that happens! But we worry that the same habits may lead to the same outcomes -- and then the parent is paying for more expensive tutors.

The A+ Club academic program gets beyond tutoring and helps students build overall academic ownership, independence and success.

• First, we identify student goals: where does the student want to be?

• Next, we identify core student processes: what's the student doing, how does the student go about being a student?

• Now we identify student needs, be it executive function support, time management and organization, or content tutoring.

• Then we build student processes to help meet the goals by supporting student needs and developing the skills required for overall academic success and better grades.