Under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), supplemental educational services (SES) are meant to be high-quality out-of-school tutoring services for low-income students in underperforming schools. Schools must use a portion of their Title I funds to pay for these services. SES tutoring providers can include both for-profit and not-for-profit organizations, as well as school districts in good standing under NCLB requirements. The SES provision has been subject to a good deal of criticism and low student participation rates. Critics have referred to this policy as an unfunded mandate. Some attribute the low participation numbers to a lack of adequate financial resources for full implementation. Others argue that districts and schools do not want to give up control of their resources and power to outside agencies and, therefore, are not implementing the policy energetically.

Extant research on the SES policy largely focuses on inputs and outputs. In contrast, this study focuses on local implementers and investigates the policy implementation process among three school districts in New York State. The study examines how local implementers make sense of the supplemental educational services policy and how this sensemaking affects the way the SES policy is implemented.

A sensemaking conceptual model applied to the SES implementation process reveals how local implementers understand and interpret the SES policy and the larger No Child Left Behind Act, the actions local implementers take to carry out the SES policy, and how and why policy implementation differs across the three school districts. Local implementers from the three school districts approach the SES policy in different ways based on their sensemaking. The study suggests that sensemaking guides the actions of local leaders and affects both the implementation fidelity and success of the SES policy.