In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the elementary school serving students in the Tangelo Park neighborhood of Orlando suffered many of the problems plaguing its counterparts in other low-income urban neighborhoods: it had poor attendance and declining test scores, and nearly half of students from Tangelo Park were dropping out of Dr. Phillips High School.¹ Though Tangelo Park is situated just 5 miles from the International Drive tourist area and Universal Studios, the lives of Tangelo Park’s children and their families, 90 percent of whom are African American or Afro-Caribbean, could not have been more different from those of the millions of annual visitors to Disney World and Orlando’s other famous resorts. Originally built to house workers at the former Martin Marietta headquarters (now Lockheed Martin), the Tangelo Park neighborhood suffered from racial and socioeconomic isolation similar to that of many low-income black neighborhoods. Residents had few public services to draw on and limited public transportation options. ²

When Robert Allen was hired as principal of Tangelo Park Elementary School in 1991, he took over a school with a D–F classification that wanted badly to improve its image and connect with the community. Many parents were working multiple jobs and not coming to parent-teacher conferences; some were afraid of the physical walk to school because of rampant crime; and others saw their children’s education as the school’s responsibility. Mobility was also very high. Though most Tangelo Park residents owned their homes, many of the homeowners were grandparents, with children moving in and out frequently, so teachers were often teaching a totally different group of students at the year’s end from those they had met in September.

Response

At the same time, the neighborhood had a palpable sense of pride and was trying to “take back” its streets from crime, drugs, and gangs.³ Longtime resident Sam Butler describes how the community’s unique culture led it to respond forcefully and successfully to the violence it was experiencing:

We were a community of people who had been places, did things—served in the military, worked for corporations like Lockheed Martin—and knew something about what we would like for our community. We had a nucleus of people who were not willing to accept the crime, the drugs, the “mischief” that some other neighborhoods sort of laid down for. We wanted a better place for our children, a safer environment to raise our children. About 10 men got together and said “Hey, we can do something about this.” ⁴

At the same time that Tangelo Park residents were organizing to improve their neighborhood, Harris Rosen, an Orlando hotelier, was assessing the barriers to school and life success for many of the children across the city. Convinced that the fixes lay in the education system, he reached out to two friends who knew that system well. An initial meeting took place in Harris’ office with Sara Sprinkle, coordinator of early childhood education for the Orange County Public School System and with Bill Spoon, then-principal of Dr. Phillips High School. They decided to design a scholarship program that would provide free tuition, room, board, books, and travel expenses for any Dr. Phillips High School student from a designed neighborhood who was accepted to a state university, a community college, or a trade or vocational school. During the meeting, however, Sprinkle suggested that if the program was to be successful in getting heavily disadvantaged students to and through college, it had to include a preschool component to prepare them for kindergarten. Both Harris and Spoon agreed, and the Tangelo Park Two-Three-Four-Year-Old program was conceived, along with the “Promise” scholarships.

The next step was to identify the right community that needed a helping hand and would be receptive to and likely to benefit from Rosen’s proposed sponsorship. The planning group contacted County Commissioner Mable Butler who “knew of the perfect community and could take you right over there.” She gave Rosen a tour of Tangelo Park, and he agreed that it would be a good fit. The team then met with Tangelo Park Elementary School Principal Robert Allen, who by his own admission was a bit skeptical of Rosen’s plan. Allen suggested holding a community town hall meeting so that the neighborhood’s residents could hear from Rosen himself about the planned scholarship program. As Allen describes it, “A somewhat hesitant citizenry listened to Harris and wondered if the community had to wait 15 years for the promised scholarships, because it would take that long for the early childhood students to graduate from high school. Rosen’s response was ‘We all begin our college scholarship program this June with a working partnership between the Tangelo Park community, the Harris Rosen Foundation, and Orange County Public Schools.'”⁵

Rosen, the president and CEO of Rosen Hotels and Resorts, had grown up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan as a child of Jewish immigrant parents who had come to the country with virtually nothing. He thus understood both the barriers that Tangelo Park children faced to success in school and the potential of the right interventions to help them overcome those barriers.⁶ In 1994 he committed funding from his foundation to ensure those supports, which have since expanded substantially. With Rosen’s financial backing, the Tangelo Park Program meets a range of community educational, social, and economic needs through quality child care programs, parent training and supports, and student access to post-secondary education and training opportunities.⁷

After all of these years working with the Tangelo Park community, we are absolutely convinced that there is as much intellectual talent in our underserved neighborhoods as there is in any of our more affluent gated communities. If that is true, then as the United Negro College Fund suggests, we are sadly wasting millions of minds in our nation, which we simply cannot afford to do.
– Harris Rosen, president and CEO, Rosen Hotels and Resorts and founder, Tangelo Park Program⁸

Strategy for change

The Tangelo Park Program (TPP) is a community-based initiative that promotes civic commitment by private, public, and community organizations to children’s educational success.⁹ The initiative has a three-part strategy that is bolstered by access to vocational programs and support from alumni:

1. Ensuring that all the community’s children are ready for kindergarten through a combination of quality child care and enriching prekindergarten.
2. Supporting parents to be full partners in their children’s education from birth all the way through high school.
3.  Guaranteeing college scholarships; this guarantee provides not only the hope that Rosen says is key to making college a high priority, but also the practical means to make that hope a reality.¹⁰

Coalition

The Tangelo Park Program is governed by a two-tier board: a legal board of officers, and the Community Advisory Board, a functional panel of people who are directly involved with providing services to the Tangelo Park community. The Community Advisory Board has organized the community’s various agencies into one body with a unified agenda, and it works with three sets of partners (including community agencies), to design and deliver comprehensive educational opportunities to each of the neighborhood’s children.¹¹ The three sets of partners are:

• School: Members from schools serving the neighborhood—including Tangelo Park Elementary School’s current principal, its former principal Robert Allen (who now serves as the chair of both the TPP legal board and the Community Advisory Board), a high school counselor, and an early childhood education specialist—are among the leaders of TPP’s programs.¹²
• Community: Community partners include the Tangelo Park Civic Association (TPCA), which played a crucial role in uniting the Tangelo Park community in the early 1990s to fight off drugs and blight. The TPCA provides information about community events, initiatives, and concerns, and serves as a proactive facilitator and liaison for the community. Tangelo Baptist Church helps families access educational and social services, and the Tangelo Park YMCA provides a variety of out-of-school supports.¹³ The Tangelo Park Neighborhood Center for Families—a county-sponsored service hub that is located within the elementary school—offers family counseling, pediatric health care, a food pantry, computer and internet access, and more.¹⁴ (Unlike the school, TPCA, church, and YMCA, the Center for Families is a state-sponsored agency. So it does not coordinate its calendar with the other TPP community agencies and is not a core partner in the same sense.)
• Outside of the community: The Research Initiative for Teaching Effectiveness, which is part of the Center for Distributed Learning at the University of Central Florida, leads research on and documentation of Tangelo Park’s achievements. In addition, individual volunteers and organizations, such as Junior Achievement, do not sit on the advisory board but provide their services pro bono. Since 2008, Cornell University students have supported many aspects of TPP through Cornell’s Alternative Spring Break program.¹⁵
  

This program is drastically different from others because it wraps both arms around the community and says we are here to serve you and help you become the best person you can be. A lot of these programs, they have only one piece here and one piece there.
– Bernice King, director of the King Center in Atlanta¹⁶

Comprehensive services

Through its various programs, TPP provides support, free of cost, to all residents of the Tangelo Park community age 2 to 22 and their parents.¹⁷ Services include:

• Early childhood education—Ensuring that every child is ready to start kindergarten begins with high-quality day care provided through a network of home-based centers throughout the community. The Tangelo Park child care program (the “2-3-4-Year-Old Program”) began in 1995 with two providers. As of 2017, there were 9–10 providers each year, depending on the number of children, with a caregiver:child ratio of 1:6. Several specifics of the 2-3-4-Year-Old Program are essential to fully preparing children for their K–12 years. All caregivers are 4-C certified in the State of Florida. This certification, a key quality metric, means that providers have at least 45 hours of training coursework, including courses in child care rules and regulations; health, safety, and nutrition; identifying and reporting child abuse and neglect; child growth and development; and behavioral observation and screening. Providers also work under the supervision of a certified early childhood education specialist, who visits each home-based center four times per week to manage the center’s curriculum and program.¹⁸

The 2-3-4-Year-Old Program, which is designed to nurture children’s developmental, social, and emotional skills, operates all day, from 7:30 am to 5:00 pm, five days a week and 50 weeks per year—allowing parents to work normal hours. Rosen equips each child care center with computers and printers, which providers use as learning tools. (The Starfall website, for example, offers learning games with shapes, colors, numbers, and letters, helping children learn that foundational material while also gaining familiarity with the computer and mouse.¹⁹) Care providers are also supported by a nurse, who works closely with parents and families to “complement home care and day care developmental, educational and psychological milestones.”²⁰

The ECE specialist places children in the homes for child care. She provides learning materials for each care provider on a weekly basis. She makes sure that the homes are in compliance with DCF rules and regulations. She also takes learning activities out to each home during the week and works with the children. Once she’s back on the school campus she has different duties, including teaching a group of kindergarten children each afternoon.
– Patti Jo Church-Houle, Rosen Preschool Director²¹

Parents of children in the 2-3-4-Year-Old Program also take parenting classes; the parents of two-year-olds are required to take at least two classes during the year. Children who will be entering kindergarten (or younger children who will first be attending Tangelo Park’s pre-K program) are assessed three times during the year for a range of academic skills, information that the program lead uses to help parents work with their children to ensure they are fully prepared for school. The program lead also communicates regularly with pre-K and kindergarten teachers to identify and reduce gaps in student readiness, assure a smooth transition into school, and keep track of students’ progress.²²

This has been so good for the children of Tangelo Park. . . . You see a huge difference between kids who did the [2-3-4-Year-Old] Program and those who come from elsewhere.
– Diondra Newton, former principal, Tangelo Park Elementary School²³

Tangelo Park Elementary School also has both a pre-K and a Head Start program. In addition to early childhood and parent supports, the Head Start program offers a food pantry and assistance for public utilities and referrals.²⁴

• Family support—In the Tangelo Park Program’s early years, the Family Service Center provided support for day care providers, parents, and pre-K teachers and coordinated activities among different organizations, such as the elementary school, YMCA, and church. More recently, an early childhood specialist from the 2-3-4-Year-Old Program has served as the liaison between the school and community and held parenting workshops at the Family Service Center (which no longer exists) throughout the year. The 2-3-4-Year-Old Program supervisor also conducts hearing and vision checks.²⁵

In addition, a Parent Leadership Training program helps parents address their children’s needs through education on decision-making and positive communication skills. The program, which was initiated by the University of Central Florida, begins by helping parents understand the school system—a common challenge in high-poverty and isolated communities—and goes on to explain the importance of and help them build leadership skills that advance their engagement in and advocacy for their children and their children’s schools.²⁶

• Health care —Vision and hearing screenings are conducted at the elementary school; for other health care needs, parents can take their children to the Neighborhood Center for Families, which coordinates a community health program with a nurse from Health Central—Orlando’s not-for-profit comprehensive community hospital—to provide free physical exams and prescriptions.²⁷
• Enrichment and extracurricular programs —The YMCA provides educational, recreational, and civic activities, from enrichment programs to instructional support for suspended students—with help from Rosen to, for example, hire a lifeguard for children’s swimming classes. The Tangelo Park Baptist Church has established an instructional center, staffed entirely by volunteers—some of whom are former teachers—to help students with homework and help them prepare for important exams, like the SAT.

Starting in March 2008, Cornell University students have come to Tangelo Park each year for an “Alternative Spring Break” week to work with preschool and elementary school students on a variety of projects. The Cornell students help plan and execute science and literacy fairs sponsored by the elementary school. They coordinate with the elementary school principal prior to their arrival in Orlando to help organize the events and plan projects for the elementary students; then they work in the classroom with the teachers during the four full school days they are in Orlando. They also serve as short-term mentors for 6th, 7th, and 8th grade middle school students.²⁸ The mentoring is usually, but not always, limited to the spring break period, and focuses on issues relevant to succeeding in college, including the benefits of attending a local versus an out-of-state college, obtaining/securing financial aid, choosing a major, scheduling classes/homework/study groups, and diversity. University of Central Florida researcher Marcella Bush notes that the Cornell students “challenge Tangelo Park students to get outside of their comfort zone.”²⁹ They also get to attend a board meeting and a reflection session as part of their spring break experience.

Robert Allen also points to teacher coaching that has enabled existing teachers to enhance their skills and build on their passions, with the program evolving over time to enable him to train teachers who in turn coach others. TPP also provides counseling for students starting in elementary and through middle and high school to ensure that they have the academic and other support they need.

• Post-secondary support—The Rosen Foundation Scholarship endowment guarantees all graduating high school seniors who live in Tangelo Park a full scholarship that covers tuition, room, board, and living expenses to any vocational school, community college, or public university in the state of Florida. (These kinds of initiatives are commonly called “Promise” programs. There are now dozens of Promise communities across the country, with Kalamazoo, Michigan—where the Promise program is funded by an anonymous group of local philanthropists—perhaps the best-known example.) Scholarship alumni now provide mentoring to current scholarship recipients (see the “Indicators of progress” section for more information).

When needed, TPP also provides extra support for students who are struggling in college. “We have had a few kids that weren’t taking full advantage of the scholarship program, so we look at their grades, call them in to meet with them one-on-one, and try to figure out what the problem is and provide counseling, maybe looking at a different major if necessary.”³⁰

• Data collection and evaluation—Charles Dziuban, director of the University of Central Florida’s Research Initiative for Teaching Effectiveness (RITE), working with Marcella Bush—part of the Tangelo Park Program’s interagency team — conducts the research on and documents the program’s initiatives and achievements. This includes updating needs assessments in collaboration with the four Community Advisory Board organizations and analyzing the program’s impact. The University of Central Florida also helps facilitate activities for Tangelo Park parents, provides academic tutoring for both students and adults, and offers health screening services, including prenatal care, free of cost within the community.³¹

Twenty-one years later, with an infusion of $11 million of Mr. Rosen’s money so far, Tangelo Park is a striking success story. Nearly all of its seniors graduate from high school, and most go on to college on full scholarships Mr. Rosen has financed. . . . “We are sitting on gold here now,” said Jeroline G. Adkinson, president of the Tangelo Park Civic Association and a longtime resident of the mostly black community. “It has helped change the community.” ³²

Foundational policies and practices

Comprehensive approaches to education like that instituted in Tangelo Park tend to be bolstered both by practices that are specific to a community and by local- and state-level policies that support the program’s mission. At the same time, counterproductive policies can impede an initiative’s mission and make replication of such strategies more difficult. Both types of policies are visible with respect to Tangelo Park. Productive policies and practices are explored in this section, and counterproductive state-level policies are discussed in the following section.

An engaged community helped get TPP started and keeps it strong

One aspect of Tangelo Park that is unusual among areas of concentrated poverty and that has helped it is its high level of homeownership. Because residents in similar neighborhoods tend to rent, they have higher rates of mobility and less social capital. Tangelo Park is also a very small community—just 3,000 residents—making it more cohesive and easier for one philanthropist to support effectively.³³
Evidence of the community’s activism and cohesion can be seen in pre–Tangelo Park Program efforts to eradicate drug dealing and combat signs of blight. Robert Allen notes that the community “was ripe” for an early education program and for Rosen’s investments as a whole when the program was initiated in 1993.³⁴

The community’s cohesion is enhanced by the Tangelo Park Program’s grounding in community engagement—the neighborhood’s residents, community organizations, and educators are central to managing it. Child care centers that are situated in neighborhood homes and run by the homeowners, means that each has its own distinct personality. One home specializes in serving many children with developmental disabilities; the owner’s own daughter died at age 42 of complications from Down syndrome, so she has personal experience with issues that children with disabilities face.³⁵

The preschools foster relationships in the community. There are no more than six kids in each home preschool. The schools are operated by a homeowner, who we vet, train, and certify. . . . In essence, they are very much like the neighborhood moms of the 1950s who watched over all the neighborhood kids.
– Harris Rosen³⁶

The Parent Leadership Training (PLT) program grew out of the University of Central Florida’s membership on the TPP interagency team; meetings with the elementary school principal and the YMCA director, along with input from the larger team, led to the development, implementation, and, ultimately, evaluation of the PLT.³⁷ This program also fills a critical gap: an emerging line of research suggests that public schools are designed for middle-class parents who are set up to make key decisions for their children, and that schools thus fail to provide the guidance that less-educated parents rely on.³⁸

College scholarships provide incentives for success in school

As in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and other “Promise” communities, college scholarships have galvanized the Tangelo Park community to ensure that its children are able to take advantage of those opportunities. For example, the Neighborhood Center for Families, which “encompasses non-profit organizations, government agencies, churches, and civic groups, . . . supports families to help them attain the Rosen scholarship.”³⁹ Noradeen Farlekas, who researched several Promise communities as part of her dissertation work, finds that such comprehensive supports are critical: “It’s all about poverty. So in Detroit [another Promise community, but one that lacks this community aspect], of the 25 percent that do graduate from high school, almost none are prepared for even community college—it’s hard for kids to be successful in college if they are only reading at the fourth- or sixth-grade level—and very few can take advantage of the scholarships.”⁴⁰

Another challenge in Detroit is that its scholarships offer substantially fewer benefits. Tangelo Park Program scholarships are similar to those of Kalamazoo, and both are among the most generous in the nation. They are so-called first-dollar scholarships—meaning that students do not have to first apply for loans and fail to receive them in order to take advantage of the Promise scholarships—and the scholarships cover full tuition plus other core expenses.⁴¹ Farlekas points to extensive research showing the barriers to academic and life success—for low-income students in particular—that accruing student debt poses. Structuring scholarships in intentional, generous ways that minimize “red tape” is essential to enabling college completion and averting financial stress down the line.⁴²

State law supports parent engagement, child care programs

• Parent engagement—Federal education legislation—most prominently the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA)—encourages parent engagement in education. In practice, however, it is state and federal requirements and rules that drive the degree to which parents are engaged and their engagement is valued. State legislation enacted in Florida around 2000, which transfers power from central office administration to school advisory councils (SACs), also requires that parents constitute the majority of SAC membership and that the school’s population diversity is proportionately represented.⁴³ These rules laid the foundation for the Parent Leadership Training that has been a powerful resource in Tangelo Park.
• Family day care insurance—In 1998, Florida passed a family day care insurance law, which protects homes that are used for child care.⁴⁴ Prior to the law’s passage, insurance companies could cancel property insurance for family day care homes, posing a substantial barrier to operating the type of residential day care upon which Tangelo Park families and the program depend.⁴⁵

Policy challenges

As a small, quasi-independent community supported by a wealthy sponsor, Tangelo Park has been largely cushioned from the impacts of several state laws that might impede the development of similar initiatives in larger communities and that have proven counterproductive for other disadvantaged students across Florida and the schools serving them.

State funding for public education is very low and inequitable

Because the U.S. education system relies heavily on local property taxes to fund public schools, state funding is critical to boosting revenue in low-income areas and evening the playing field for students who live in them. Florida falls short on both of these measures: the Education Law Center, which analyzes and ranks school funding levels and equity, gives the state very low marks across the board.⁴⁶ Florida ranks 41st of all 50 states in per-pupil funding, providing just over $7,500 per student, well below the median level and substantially less than half of that in the highest-funding state, New York ($18,165). It also receives an F for “effort”—the Center’s calculation of how much Florida spends on education versus its capacity to do so. Both of these are compounded by flat distribution of those meager funds—Florida provides, on average, 97 percent as much funding for schools with 30 percent poor students as it does to schools that do not serve any poor students, so high-poverty schools are not receiving sufficient funds to meet the greater needs they face. Finally, from 2008 to 2014, Florida fell further in the effort index (tumbling 24 percent) than any other state but Hawaii.

These numbers pose major challenges for high-poverty schools, which struggle to compete with wealthier districts for well-qualified, experienced teachers and to provide even a basic education. And while Tangelo Park is shielded from the brunt of this underfunding by the extensive resources Rosen provides, these policies hurt schools like it across the state. As longtime resident and community organizer Sam Butler says, “This really doesn’t make sense. You just sort of shake your head and say, ‘What are [state legislators] thinking?’”⁴⁷

Moreover, the state’s failure to provide sufficient funding for public education is not limited to K–12 schools. Florida’s Voluntary Pre-K program, which was enacted as a state constitutional amendment by ballot initiative in 2002 after the state legislature refused to enact it, has consistently been among the nation’s worst-resourced and lowest-quality state programs. State spending per child enrolled has declined from just under $2,800 in 2006 to $2,300 in 2015, making Florida 40th in state spending of the 42 states that fund pre-K programs. According to the National Institute of Early Education Research’s (NIEER’s) annual yearbook, The State of Preschool 2015, Florida’s program meets just three of NIEER’s 10 quality benchmarks and none of the benchmarks related to teacher qualifications.⁴⁸ Early childhood scholar Steven Barnett, president of NIEER, has been a vocal critic of Florida’s program, warning that “Low investment will not yield high results if quality is absent, regardless of how many children participate.”⁴⁹

Test-based accountability policies have punitive impacts that harm low-income, minority students, schools, and communities

Florida was an early pioneer of policies that rely on students’ scores on standardized tests to evaluate and grade educators and schools and to tie those evaluations to consequences. Although such strategies have been increasingly discredited, the state has retained them, with resulting problems for schools and communities like Tangelo Park.⁵⁰

In 1999, Florida adopted a school accountability plan that assigns schools a letter grade from “A” to “F” like a report card, based heavily on its students’ test scores on the annual Florida standardized test (the “FCAT”). A growing body of evidence and feedback from educators and other education experts points to not only the system’s flaws but its potential to do harm to high-poverty schools in particular.⁵¹ Sam Butler comments that

The grading system in itself is maybe not a bad idea, just on the surface. But what it does is forces schools and principals to focus on passing those tests, so a lot of the school year is spent on trying to get that child to be able to pass some standardized test. I believe that if they just taught the children well, then the taking of the test would take care of itself. We are so busy wrapped up trying to pass tests that some kids can’t even tell you where they live. ⁵²

The negative effects of the A–F grading system have been compounded by other test-score-based policies. In 2010, Florida won a $700 million grant as one of the first Race to the Top state recipients (with $23.7 million going to Orange County, in which Tangelo Park is located). In fulfillment of its state commitments, Florida has enacted laws intended to improve teacher quality, turn around low-performing schools, and integrate the Common Core state standards. Some of these policies have had perverse effects. For example, the School Success Act evaluates teachers and determines their pay largely on the basis of so-called value-added measurements (VAM), which have been found to inaccurately reflect teacher effectiveness, as well as channeling classroom time toward test preparation and reducing teacher morale and, thus, ironically, effectiveness.⁵³

Other state education policies, too, suggest the legislature’s lack of attention to the evidence base supporting a given policy. Florida enacted a tax credit scholarship program in 2001 that uses public education dollars to provide vouchers to private and parochial schools and that was expanded in 2010, in the face of mounting evidence that such vouchers do not benefit the low-income students they purport to help.⁵⁴ And Florida’s laws authorizing, governing, and regulating charter schools are among the nation’s laxest, contributing to poor outcomes for students; the largest and most-cited study on the academic impacts of charter schools finds that Florida students in regular public schools have greater academic growth than their equivalent peers in charter schools, making the state one of a handful of low performers both in 2009 and in the follow-up 2013 study.⁵⁵

In all, Florida has a pattern of underinvesting in its public schools—and especially in its most vulnerable students—that poses additional challenges for communities like Tangelo Park and that make the support of donors like Harris Rosen all the more critical.

Funding

The Tangelo Park Program is entirely privately funded, though it benefits substantially from a range of in-kind donations and volunteer efforts.
Annual funding ranges from $500,000 to $1,000,000 for the approximately 500 students who are in preschools, high school feeder patterns, and colleges, community colleges, or other post-secondary institutions in a given year. The New York Times reported in 2015 that Harris Rosen had donated $11 million so far.⁵⁶ (Researcher Charles Dziuban places the number closer to $13 million.⁵⁷)

Rosen’s generosity, and the publicity it has attracted, has resulted in other gifts, like that of former Miami Heat point guard Dwyane Wade, who visited Tangelo Park Elementary School during the NBA All-Star Weekend in February 2012 to host what he termed a “Work Hard, Play Hard” rally (part of a larger FCAT rally) and announce a donation to the school of two new basketball courts.⁵⁸

The Orlando Magic and the Edyth Bush Charitable Foundation have both donated to TPP, and the program has also received several awards from Disney that included monetary prizes.
A National Science Foundation (NSF) grant entitled “Bringing Engineering to Tangelo Park” enhanced the Tangelo Park–University of Central Florida (UCF) partnership through a new project that increased the community’s understanding of high-tech career opportunities to ensure that their students have the skills and knowledge needed to succeed in post-secondary quantitative education programs. The initial meeting brought together a broad range of community and UCF leaders and members, along with Rosen, a representative of the Orange County Public School System, and practicing engineers. And in 2004, TPP held a science day at the YMCA that was a result of activities prompted by the grant (though it was not financially supported by it).

Indicators of progress

The Tangelo Park Program began to deliver benefits for students and their families and schools quickly and has seen those benefits increase over the past two-plus decades. Researchers Charles Dziuban and Marcella Bush, who collect and analyze data on TPP at the University of Central Florida’s RITE, have documented progress on several fronts.⁵⁹

Academic benefits begin early and are sustained through a comprehensive strategy

• As a result of comprehensive, quality early childhood education, students enter elementary school with well-developed motor, cognitive, and social skills, as well as reading, writing, and basic mathematics skills. The share of children from the 2-3-4-Year-Old Program who are on or above track in elementary school has been at least 70 percent and as high as 82 percent every academic year since 2001–02.⁶⁰
  
• And data from the Voluntary Pre-K Assessment, which are aligned with state learning standards, show that nearly two-thirds of children who graduate from the 2-3-4-Year-Old Program already have strong print knowledge skills going into their pre-K year (they meet or exceed expectations). By the end of the pre-K year, all children meet or exceed expectations in print knowledge; virtually all—97 percent—meet or exceed expectations in phonological awareness; and nearly nine in 10 meet or exceed expectations in oral language/vocabulary.⁶¹
•  In 2008, Tangelo Park Elementary School ranked fourth in learning gains in all of Central Florida, and in 2009, it received the Florida State Literacy Leader of the Year award. It is one of a handful of low-income schools to receive an “A” rating in 2004, 2006, and 2008.⁶²
• Since TPP’s inception, mobility has fallen from about 50 percent to virtually zero.

There is a lot more consistency now, which helps tremendously, as teachers no longer have to work with a different class of kids from the start of the year to the end. Teacher morale has really picked up now that they have time to work with kids, the kids come into pre-K and kindergarten programs already able to read, and parents are so engaged. We even have dads coming in to volunteer and getting engaged. The difference [the Tangelo Park Program has made] is like night and day.
– Robert Allen, former principal, Tangelo Park Elementary School, and chair, Tangelo Park Community Advisory Board⁶³

• Between 2005 and 2012, at least 90 percent of Tangelo Park’s high school students earned a regular four-year diploma, with a 100 percent graduation rate in 2011 and 2012. In comparison, the state’s rate climbed from 59 percent in 2004 to 76 percent in 2013.⁶⁴
• Nearly one-third of Tangelo Park graduates who enter community college and who remain in Tangelo Park complete an associate degree, while those who choose a vocational school complete at a rate of 83 percent. Of high school graduates who enroll in four-year post-secondary schools, 78 percent attain a degree, and of those who go on to graduate school, almost all (over 90 percent) complete those programs.⁶⁵ These rates far exceed state and national averages for low-income and minority students. An estimate based on income would have predicted 50 college graduates since 1994 (or 9–12 percent of students); in that time, 118 TPP students have earned bachelor’s degrees and 54 have completed associate degrees (including 32 who earned both). And of the 118 bachelor’s degree earners, 24 have finished graduate degrees, including three doctorates.⁶⁶

Harris Rosen recalls the difference from 1993—when he asked how many children wanted to go to college, and just two or three hands went up—versus a year later, after the scholarship was announced—when “every hand went up.”⁶⁷ And the share of students who are eligible for scholarships but leave Tangelo Park before graduating and thus cannot take advantage of the scholarships has fallen sharply, from over half in 1994 and 1996 and about one in four in the early 2000s to virtually none in 2012 and 2013 (2 percent and 1 percent, respectively).⁶⁸

It caused me to really focus. I took honors classes, became highly involved in extracurriculars [at Dr. Phillips High School] . . . It was a really big deal for me.
– Shanathan Crayton, 1999 high school graduate, who got a bachelor’s degree at Florida A&M University, completed two master’s degrees, and is now a grant coordinator for Miami Dade College
[Mr. Rosen] has taken the burden off me and my entire family. He opened up a lot of doors.
– Ariana Plaza, 2015 graduate of Dr. Phillips High School who entered the University of Central Florida as a pre-med student
When people have the resources to go and succeed, there’s a ripple effect. It becomes generational. No one in my family ever went to college before, but now, my baby sister can’t even picture a life without college. My mother even went back and got her degree. I showed her that she could do it.
– Donna Wilcox, who used her Rosen scholarship to earn a bachelor’s degree at the University of Central Florida and then went on to get a master’s degree at the University of Georgia

• One study estimated the early economic benefits of TPP by comparing changes in high school completion and college attendance rates in Tangelo Park with rates among Florida students of similar backgrounds over the same time period.⁶⁹ University of Western Ontario professor Lance Lochner found that high school graduation rates increased by about 17 percent and college attendance rates by over 30 percent after the introduction of the program, with an estimated resulting increase in lifetime earnings of roughly $50,000 per student. Based on these impacts, along with smaller benefits from reduced crime, Lochner estimates the total annual benefit to a cohort of Tangelo Park students to be $1.05 million. This means a societal return of seven to one from Rosen’s investments, since his nearly $13 million investment would lead to a societal gain of just under $90 million, or about seven times what he had spent (at that time).
• As of 2015, Rosen had distributed nearly 450 college scholarships, including 20 among the 2015 graduating class of 25 students.⁷⁰ Because each successive cohort of graduates is better able to secure its own scholarships, the share of his support going to college scholarships has declined—currently the spending on the 2-3-4-Year-Old Program is twice the spending on college scholarships—and overall the amount of support needed from Rosen has gone down.
• Moreover, because of the generous scholarship program, Tangelo Park graduates are finishing college without student loan burdens. While the share of U.S. bachelor’s degree recipients with student loan debt has risen from 59 percent to 77 percent over the past two decades, and the average amount of student loan debt has risen from $12,850 to $31,850 over that period, TPP graduates have no student loan debt at all.⁷¹

The community as a whole has seen its quality of life improve

A neighborhood once plagued with crime and in disrepair is now thriving. Crime rates fell sharply in the program’s initial years, as did mobility rates among both residents and students, and the average home in Tangelo Park, which was worth $45,000 in 1993, is now valued at $150,000. Dr. Dziuban views the drop in student mobility from over 50 percent to virtually zero as a clear reflection of the incentives to stay that are provided by the scholarships and other program opportunities.⁷²

Economist Lance Lochner estimates the monetary benefits of the reduction in crime in Tangelo Park—in particular a reduction in assaults, which are very costly for residents—from the year of the program’s inception to a decade later.⁷³ Relative to other, comparable communities in Florida and to the state as a whole, he found much larger reductions in crime in all of the categories he measured but robberies. Lochner estimates savings for the community of between $270,000 and $300,000.⁷⁴

While it’s not clear exactly how much of this positive change is due to the Tangelo Park Program and how much is attributable to broader trends (such as a national drop in crime), both residents and law enforcement officials see TPP as a major driver. Orange County Sheriff Jerry L. Dennings says that “the quality of life [in Tangelo Park] has improved significantly” and, as a result, his officers no longer have to make frequent stops there.⁷⁵ And Lt. Lynn Stickley of the Orange County Sheriff’s Office says, “We now consider Tangelo Park to be an oasis.”⁷⁶

Former scholarship beneficiaries have often come back to the community to offer support. In 2013, that support became more structured when a group of Rosen Foundation Scholarship graduates formed the Alumni Association, which now includes a mentoring program to support current scholarship recipients.

The community also benefits indirectly from the strong parental involvement in children’s education that is driven by the structure of the Tangelo Park Program. The early childhood programs have been intentionally designed to foster a strong sense of neighborhood culture and collaboration. And the Parent Leadership Training (PLT) piloted in Tangelo Park has led the parents who have participated in it to take a more active role in their children’s school activities, from helping their children with homework to communicating more with teachers, volunteering in classrooms, and even becoming members of the school government. Two researchers who assessed the impacts of PLT report that “During the graduation ceremony [for the first ‘class’ of PLT participants], school administrators and the YMCA staff described the changes they noted in parents. The elementary school principal, for example, reported that all the new [School Advisory Council] officers were former PLT participants.”⁷⁷ Research shows that such parent involvement and leadership, which is rare in places like Tangelo Park, is key to enabling advocacy on behalf of the school that drives improvements from better funding and infrastructure to effective instruction. And because stronger schools make for stronger communities, the entire neighborhood benefits.

Tangelo Park’s success drives outreach to other communities

The Tangelo Park Program has been featured in the University of Central Florida’s magazine Pegasus and several other local Florida publications; in the New York Times; and on MSFE-TV Channel 24’s local series “Family Works” (where it was the subject of the series’ first broadcast, in 1995).⁷⁸ It has also received several Walt Disney World Community Service Awards, including the 1995 Bob Allan Award.⁷⁹ The TPP Parent Leadership Training has been recognized in well-known education journals such as Urban Education.

Together with representatives from the University of Central Florida, Tangelo Park residents gave presentations promoting TPP at Sloan-C International Conferences on Asynchronous Learning Networks in Jacksonville, Florida, in 2000 and 2003, and also in Washington, D.C.⁸⁰ Board members also presented at teacher education conferences in 1999 in Washington, D.C., and in 2000 in Jacksonville. Parent Leadership Training representatives have provided parent leadership trainings in Orlando’s Parramore neighborhood (see the next section for more about Parramore) and elsewhere. In fact, program leaders and residents found themselves speaking so frequently with visitors interested in replicating the program that they developed a document offering guidance on how other communities could get organized to do so.⁸¹

In April 2017, the work of Dziuban and Bush and their RITE team to support, evaluate, and disseminate information about the accomplishments of the Tangelo Park Program was recognized through the University of Central Florida’s inaugural Collective Excellence award. Provost Dale Whittaker, who presented the award, along with a $15,000 stipend to expand the team’s work, said “the new award will recognize a team each year whose work exemplifies one of seven categories: powering partnerships, creating access, dreaming big, unleashing potential, harnessing scale, amplifying impact or transforming lives.”⁸²

The program is being expanded to Orlando’s Parramore neighborhood

With Tangelo Park solidly successful, in the fall of 2015 Rosen began to plan for the extension of the program in the downtown Orlando neighborhood of Parramore. (As mentioned in the previous section, Parent Leadership Training representatives from Tangelo Park laid some of the groundwork for the expansion through trainings of Parramore parent leaders in 2001 and 2002.⁸³) In addition to providing scholarships for graduates of Jones High School in Parramore, the program will provide preschool for two- and three-year-olds at a new pre-K–8 school for neighborhood students; the school will be built and managed by the district but the preschool wing will be furnished and staffed with funding from Rosen as per his negotiations with the district.⁸⁴ In addition to the main building, the school—which will serve 800–900 students from preschool to grade 8—will include on its 14-acre campus a Boys & Girls Club, a health clinic, and athletic fields. Physical health care services will range from well-child and sick visits, vaccinations, and pediatric medication to X-rays and specialty referrals. Students will also receive preventive and emergency dental care, along with counseling and case and medication management to address their mental health and wellness needs.⁸⁵

This expansion represents a substantially greater challenge than the one Rosen took on more than 20 years ago: Parramore is five times the size of Tangelo Park; it is home to a large public housing project; and it has a more transient population.⁸⁶ Rosen had expressed hopes that the ambitious move would help persuade others like him to make similar investments; one such investment has already been committed. Before the new school has even opened, the University of Central Florida’s College of Medicine promised to provide full scholarships to any student who attends the new pre-K–8 school, graduates from Jones High School, and attains an undergraduate degree at the University of Central Florida.⁸⁷

In May 2016, Rosen presented college scholarships to the first 15 Jones High School graduates since the inception of the Parramore Program. One of the recipients, Jahquetta Jones, who had a 3.9 high school GPA, plans to study criminal justice at University of Central Florida and would like to work for the Orlando Police Department and, eventually, the FBI.⁸⁸ She is currently enrolled at Valencia College, a local community college, where she finished her first semester with a 3.66 GPA. Among the second group of Jones High School graduates under the Parramore Program (the Class of 2017), of the 32 eligible for scholarships, three are the 2nd-, 10th-, and 12th-ranked students in the class. The slated salutatorian has already been accepted to 14 colleges, most of which are offering her full scholarships, including her first choice, the University of Florida, where she would like to study medicine so she can become a neurosurgeon.⁸⁹

Rosen looks forward to more Tangelo Park and Parramore students seeing clear paths to bright futures and taking advantage of the supports he has put in place to pave the way. As longtime resident Sam Butler notes, the impact on the Tangelo Park community has been nothing short of transformative:

[Rosen’s commitment to providing scholarships and the comprehensive supports he provides to make them viable] has been the shining light in this program. It has given our children in this community an opportunity to dream dreams and then see those dreams come to fruition. ⁹⁰

Contact: Robert Allen, chair, Tangelo Park Program, Inc., 407-484-4245 or [email protected], or visit www.tangeloparkprogram.com

Acknowledgments

The author extends thanks to Drs. Charles Dziuban and Marcella Bush of the University of Central Florida for their assistance with background information and data on the Tangelo Park Program, and to Noradeen Farlekas for sharing insights from her research on Promise communities. The author also thanks Tangelo Park residents and community leaders—including Robert Allen, Sam Butler, and Patti Jo Church-Houle—for their gracious help and contributions to this case study. Finally, deep appreciation goes to Mr. Harris Rosen for generous time spent responding to questions about the program and, most importantly, for making it happen.

Endnotes

1. Lizette Alvarez, “One Man’s Millions Turn a Community in Florida Around,” New York Times, May 25, 2015. Dr. Phillips High School is the feeder school for Tangelo Park.
2. “Big Enough,” Pegasus: The Magazine of the University of Central Florida, Summer 2012.
3. Elaine Weiss interview with Robert Allen, April 19, 2017.
4. Elaine Weiss interview with Sam Butler, May 4, 2017.
5. “Tangelo Park Program” [webpage on the Tangelo Park Program website].
6. “Big Enough,” Pegasus: The Magazine of the University of Central Florida, Summer 2012.
7. “Tangelo Park Program” [webpage on the Tangelo Park Program website].
8. Quote provided to Elaine Weiss in conversation with Mary Deatrick, assistant to Harris Rosen, May 2017.
9. The initiative was called the Tangelo Park Project in its initial three years, but has been the Tangelo Park Program since 1997, according to Patti Jo Church-Houle. In 1998 the Rosen Foundation created an endowment for Tangelo Park Program, Inc., which was established as an official 501(c)(3) organization and now had sustained support.
10. Lizette Alvarez, “One Man’s Millions Turn a Community in Florida Around,” New York Times, May 25, 2015.
11. Elaine Weiss interview with Sam Butler, May 4, 2017.
12. Elaine Weiss interview with Robert Allen, April 19, 2017.
13. “Tangelo Park Program” [webpage on the Tangelo Park Program website].
14. “Tangelo Park Neighborhood Center for Families” [webpage on the Community Coordinated Care for Children, Inc. (4C)website].
15. Tangelo Park Program [website].
16. Lizette Alvarez, “One Man’s Millions Turn a Community in Florida Around,” New York Times, May 25, 2015.
17. Parents with infants get information from Tangelo Park’s 2-3-4-Year-Old Program about child care facilities in the area. TPP had explored having neighborhood child care centers care for infants as well but the costs and regulations posed obstacles, so they recommend that parents look for 4-C certified providers but do not subsidize costs. (Information provided by Patti Jo Church-Houle in emails exchanged with Elaine Weiss in May 2017.)
18. Information provided via email by Patti Jo Church-Houle, Rosen Preschool Director, May 1, 2017.
19. The Starfall website is a free, publicly available service provided by the Starfall Family Foundation.
20. The nurse is funded by Harris Rosen. See the “2-3-4-Year-Old Program” webpage on the Tangelo Park Program website.
21. Elaine Weiss email conversation with Patti Jo Church-Houle, May 2017.
22. Email conversation with Patti Jo Church-Houle, May 2017. See the “Indicators of progress” section for results of assessments.
23. Lizette Alvarez, “One Man’s Millions Turn a Community in Florida Around,” New York Times, May 25, 2015.
24. “Tangelo Park Program” [webpage on the Tangelo Park Program website].
25. Elaine Weiss email conversation with Patti Jo Church-Houle, May 2017.
26. Sheila Y. Smalley and Maria E. Reyes-Blanes, “Reaching Out to African American Parents in an Urban Community: A Community-University Partnership,” Urban Education vol. 36, no. 4 (2001), 518–533.
27. Conversation with Patti Jo Church-Houle, who had conducted screenings years ago, and who also reports that the school nurse subsequently did them.
28. “Cornell University: Cornell Alternative Spring Break” [webpage on the Tangelo Park Program website].
29. Elaine Weiss email exchange with Marcella Bush, June 12, 2017.
30. Elaine Weiss interview with Robert Allen, April 19, 2017.
31. Sheila Y. Smalley and Maria E. Reyes-Blanes, “Reaching Out to African American Parents in an Urban Community: A Community-University Partnership,” Urban Education vol. 36, no. 4 (2001), 518–533.
32. Lizette Alvarez, “One Man’s Millions Turn a Community in Florida Around,” New York Times, May 25, 2015. Note that per researcher Charles Dziuban, the $11 million figure cited in the New York Times article is lower than the actual investment, which was nearly $13 million by 2015 (Elaine Weiss email exchange with Charles Dziuban, June 2017).
33. Lizette Alvarez, “One Man’s Millions Turn a Community in Florida Around,” New York Times, May 25, 2015.
34. Elaine Weiss conversation with Robert Allen, April 19, 2017.
35. Lauren Roth, “Tangelo Park Program Reshapes Generations in Neighborhood,” Orlando Sentinel, November 8, 2014.
36. Jim Gibbons, “The Tangelo Park Model for Transforming a Troubled Neighborhood: A Q&A with Florida Hotelier and Philanthropist Harris Rosen,” The Philanthropy Roundtable.
37. Sheila Y. Smalley and Maria E. Reyes-Blanes, “Reaching Out to African American Parents in an Urban Community: A Community-University Partnership,” Urban Education vol. 36, no. 4 (2001), 518–533.
38. Annette Lareau, Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).
39. “Family Programs: Neighborhood Center for Families” [webpage on the Tangelo Park Program website].
40. Elaine Weiss phone conversation with Noradeen Farlekas, April 4, 2017.
41. This system contrasts, for example, with Say Yes to Education, whose district-wide Promise scholarships in Syracuse and Buffalo, while including dozens of private institutions as well as public colleges and universities, are last- versus first-dollar and thus likely provide a weaker incentive for students to do the work needed to take advantage of them.
42. Noradeen Falekas, “A New Application of Social Finance: Combining Impact Investing with Philanthropy to Increase Positive Educational Outcomes and Reduce Incarceration in Low-Income, High-Crime Neighborhoods” (DLP diss. Northeastern University, 2016).
43. Sheila Y. Smalley and Maria E. Reyes-Blanes, “Reaching Out to African American Parents in an Urban Community: A Community-University Partnership,” Urban Education vol. 36, no. 4 (2001), 518–533.
44. Leaders of the Tangelo Park Program describe playing an important role in the law’s passage. See Florida Statute 627.70161.
45. Elaine Weiss email conversation with Patti Jo Church-Houle, May 2017.
46. Bruce Baker, Danielle Farrie, Monete Johnson, Theresa Luhm, and David G. Sciarra, Is School Funding Fair? A National Report Card, 6th ed. (Rutgers, New Jersey: Rutgers Graduate School of Education and Education Law Center, 2017).
47. Elaine Weiss interview with Sam Butler, May 4, 2017.
48. W. Steven Barnett, Allison H. Friedman-Krauss, Rebecca E. Gomez, Michelle Horowitz, G.G. Weisenfeld, Kirsty Clarke Brown, and James H. Squires, “Florida,” in The State of Preschool 2015: State Preschool Yearbook (National Institute for Early Education Research, 2016).
49. Jeff Solochek, “Florida’s Big, Bad Prekindergarten Program,” Tampa Bay Times, April 10, 2012.
50. See, for example, Baker et al., Problems with the Use of Student Test Scores to Evaluate Teachers, Economic Policy Institute Briefing Paper no. 278, August 29, 2010; Edward Haertel, Reliability and Validity of Inferences about Teachers Based on Student Test Scores, William H. Angoff Memorial Lecture, Educational Testing Service, March 22, 2013; and Getting Teacher Evaluation Right: A Brief for Policymakers, American Education Research Association and National Academy of Education, 2013.
51. For example, the Board of Directors of the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP) issued a statement expressing opposition to the policy, which has since been adopted by numerous other states and school districts. See “A–F School Rating Systems” [webpage on the NASSP website].
52. Elaine Weiss interview with Sam Butler, May 4, 2017.
53. Edward H. Haertel, Reliability and Validity of Inferences about Teachers Based on Student Test Scores, Educational Testing Service, William H. Angoff Memorial Lecture, 2013; Tim Walker, “NEA Poll: Nearly Half of Teachers Consider Leaving Profession Due to Standardized Testing,” NEA Today, November 2, 2014.
54. Martin Carnoy, Vouchers Are Not a Proven Strategy for Improving Student Achievement, Economic Policy Institute, February 28, 2017; Kevin Carey, “Dismal Voucher Results Surprise Researchers as DeVos Era Begins,” New York Times, February 13, 2017.
55. Edward Cremata, Devora Davis, Kathleen Dickey, Kristina Lawyer, Yohannes Negassi, Margaret E. Raymond, and James L. Woodworth, National Charter School Study 2013 (Stanford, Calif.: Center for Research on Education Outcomes [CREDO] at Stanford University, 2013).
56. Lizette Alvarez, “One Man’s Millions Turn a Community in Florida Around,” New York Times, May 25, 2015.
57. Elaine Weiss email exchange with Charles Dziuban, June 2017.
58. Christiana Lilly, “Dwyane Wade Hosts Fatherhood Round Table with White House Staff, Visits School during NBA All-Star Weekend,” Huffington Post, February 24, 2012.
59. While these data have not been published, they have been presented at several academic conferences. For example, these data were presented by C. Dziuban and P. Moskal in the conference session “20 Years: What the Data Show and What They Don’t,” October 29, 2015, at the EDUCAUSE 2015 Annual Conference, Indianapolis, Indiana.
60. Patti Jo Church-Houle has tracked these data from the program’s inception. Three times each year—in the fall, winter, and spring—Church-Houle assesses the children in the 2-3-4-Year-Old Program who will be going into either pre-K or kindergarten the following year., She assesses the children for a range of learning goals, such as shapes, colors, numbers, letter sounds, and the ability to write their own names and birthdays. She also shares the information with parents, so they know how to help their children be better prepared for school, and she checks in with kindergarten teachers to track 2-3-4-Year-Old Program graduates’ progress in their first (pre-K or kindergarten) school year.
61. Information and data from Sharetta Taylor using data from the Florida Department of Education re VPK assessment, beginning and end of the year.
62. Documented in the TPP 15th anniversary report; recorded in Community Advisory Board meeting minutes as reported by the school principal.
63. Elaine Weiss interview with Robert Allen, April 19, 2017.
64. Data from Tangelo Park provided by Charles Dziuban. Data on Florida’s high school graduation rates from Florida Department of Education Information & Accountability Services, Florida’s High School Cohort 2015–16 Graduation Rate.
65. Charles Dziuban, Presentation on Tangelo Accomplishments (Tangelo Park Program website).
66. Charles Dziuban, Presentation on Tangelo Accomplishments (Tangelo Park Program website).
67. Lizette Alvarez, “One Man’s Millions Turn a Community in Florida Around,” New York Times, May 25, 2015.
68. Charles Dziuban, Presentation on Tangelo Accomplishments (Tangelo Park Program website).
69. Lance Lochner, “Measuring the Impacts of the Tangelo Park Project on Local Residents: Preliminary Report,” June 2007.
70. Lizette Alvarez, “One Man’s Millions Turn a Community in Florida Around,” New York Times, May 25, 2015.
71. Mark Huelsman, The Debt Divide: The Racial and Class Bias behind the “New Normal” of Student Borrowing, Demos, May 2015.
72. Charles Dziuban, Presentation on Tangelo Accomplishments (Tangelo Park Program website).
73. Lance Lochner, “Measuring the Impacts of the Tangelo Park Project on Local Residents: Preliminary Report,” June 2007. Lochner used data from the Orange County Sheriff’s Office on the number of motor vehicle thefts, burglaries, and robberies, as well as assaults and larceny. Note that comparison communities were “other communities of different sizes and which experienced different amounts of population growth.”
74. Lance Lochner, “Measuring the Impacts of the Tangelo Park Project on Local Residents: Preliminary Report,” June 2007.
75. Lizette Alvarez, “One Man’s Millions Turn a Community in Florida Around,” New York Times, May 25, 2015.
76. From transcription of unpublished interviews with Charles Dziuban and Marcella Bush, verified by Marcella Bush, May 2017.
77. Sheila Y. Smalley and Maria E. Reyes-Blanes, “Reaching Out to African American Parents in an Urban Community: A Community-University Partnership,” Urban Education vol. 36, no. 4 (2001), 531.
78. “Big Enough,” Pegasus: The Magazine of the University of Central Florida, Summer 2012; Lizette Alvarez, “One Man’s Millions Turn a Community in Florida Around,” New York Times, May 25, 2015. (The MSFE-TV television series is not available online.)
79. Sandra Mathers, “Tangelo Park Wins Disney Top Prize,” Orlando Sentinel, June 21, 1995.
80. “Tangelo Park Program” [webpage on the Tangelo Park Program website].
81. “Replicating the Tangelo Park Program” provides a nine-step template and provides answers to four key questions: (1) What steps does a community need to do to build [a] Community Action Board? (2) What empowers community members to address the needs of the community? (3) What increases the community’s awareness of community needs and local resources? and (4) How do you keep members interested in serving on the board?
82. “New Award Recognizes Collective Excellence at Founders’ Day,” University of Central Florida Colleges & Campus News (accessed June 1, 2017).
83. Tangelo Park Program 15th Anniversary Report, “Timeline of Events.”
84. Annie Martin, “Orange Schools Spell Out Details of Rosen Pact at Parramore School,” Orlando Sentinel, October 13, 2015.
85. Elaine Weiss notes from conversation with Patti Jo Church-Houle, March 22, 2017.
86. Dave Chase, “8 Steps That Could Save Employers $500 Billion and Boost Education,” Forbes, June 22, 2015.
87. Caitlin Dineen, “Officials Unveil Plans for New $41.3M School in Parramore Neighborhood,” Orlando Sentinel, January 24, 2015.
88. Annie Martin, “Harris Rosen Presents College Scholarships to 15 Jones Graduates,” Orlando Sentinel, May 17, 2016.
89. Selina Wells-Harris, Rosen Parramore PS-8 Scholarship Eligible Student Report, January 26, 2017. TPP internal document provided to Elaine Weiss in May 2017.
90. Elaine Weiss interview with Sam Butler, May 4, 2017.

In 2008, when CJ Huff was recruited to lead Joplin, Missouri’s schools, his main charge was to raise the district’s high school graduation rate, then at 73 percent. Having served as superintendent of the high-poverty school district of Eldon, Missouri since 2004, Huff recognized that high and rising student poverty rates, and the disconnect between the Joplin community and its schools, posed challenges to achieving that goal. He also knew that to enable Joplin’s teachers to do their jobs effectively, he would have to alleviate the daily stresses and trauma their students experienced due to hunger, violence, and homelessness.

Response

Huff convened a team of parents, educators, and community members to conduct one-on-one conversations with faith leaders, business leaders, and social services officials with a stake in improving their city’s schools. Over nine months, those conversations helped the team identify the core components of a plan—eventually called Bright Futures—to engage the community, tackle poverty-related impediments to learning, and, ultimately, transform the education system. They believed they could substantially raise the graduation rate and create a college-going culture that would permeate the schools from the ground up.

Peggy Fuller, vice president of Southwest Missouri Bank and an early member of the team, describes a key moment in the initiative’s evolution:

In April 2010, before we even had a name, we had a “community breakfast” where we wanted to introduce the idea to community leaders and give them a sense of the real need that existed in our town to step up and partner with our schools. We asked for help at the end of that breakfast, hoping that three or four people would agree to take on leadership positions, and we ended up with 50 who wanted to help! That’s when we knew we had struck a chord. But now we had a different problem: we had 50 people who wanted to get involved and needed to put them to work quickly. So we formed “ambassador teams” and went out in groups of three or four to visit every single school building in Joplin over the course of three weeks. We asked the same questions at every school [including]: “What do you need from your community?” “What are your biggest challenges?” and “How can more volunteers help you?” From that data-gathering project, we identified six “now needs” that we could begin working on immediately. It is my opinion that the ambassador teams were crucial to the early success, because it showed the school personnel immediately that we were serious about changing things and investing.

In 2011, a new challenge arose: Joplin was hit with one of the worst tornadoes in U.S. history, killing 161 people, including seven students, and causing nearly $3 billion in damage.¹ With the Bright Futures framework in place, however, Huff and his team were able to turn that tragedy into opportunities for the district’s schools and particularly for some of their most disadvantaged students.

Strategy for change

Huff and his staff knew that schools alone could not address all of the needs that teachers and counselors were identifying. They also knew that district superintendents (and mayors and principals) come and go, so engaging parents and a broad range of community leaders would be necessary both to their immediate efforts to support students and to ensure that their efforts would be sustainable long term. So they worked to get the entire community to take ownership of its schools, and to view the schools as key to Joplin’s success.

Their plan had three main components:

1. Ensuring that every child’s basic needs could be met within 24 hours, using a three-tiered system of support that included tapping into local human service agencies, churches, social media, and local fundraising.
2. Cultivating and building community leadership capacity to meet longer-term needs and establish the partnerships required to solve some of the greater problems faced by the youth in the community.
3. Encouraging service as a part of the school culture, so that children, teachers, and schools gave back to the community, and so that all students, particularly those accustomed to receiving help, would understand their power to give and grow into the engaged citizens that Joplin (and all communities) need.

Coalition

Bright Futures began in Joplin and has since become a national organization called Bright Futures USA, with affiliate communities in seven states. This case study discusses the evolution of the program in Joplin, now called Bright Futures Joplin. Though CJ Huff is no longer superintendent his work was instrumental and quotes from him about the initiative’s beginnings help explain its success.

Bright Futures Joplin has developed relationships with roughly 100 local institutions, including the school district, social service agencies, and dozens of business and faith institutions. Through these diverse partnerships Bright Futures delivers a broad range of services and supports to the district’s students and their families.

• The Joplin School District has taken the lead in providing enhanced mental health services, before- and after-school opportunities, mentoring, and internships, and in supporting career-and-college readiness.
• Social Service Agencies working with Bright Futures include the City of Joplin and Joplin Health Department, as well as the Economic Security Corporation and Western Missouri Legal Services. Private agencies include the Boys and Girls Club of SW Missouri and Joplin Family YMCA as well as the United Way of SW Missouri and SE Kansas. As service providers, they are equipped to support a broad range of student needs and interests that complement the services Bright Futures leverages from the school district and business and faith communities.
• Business Community Members including dozens of local businesses, from restaurants and car dealerships to banks and utility companies, work with Bright Futures, providing in-kind donations, services, and other supports.
• Faith Institutions that work with Bright Futures include St. Paul’s United Methodist Church, Young Life Christian ministry, Mount Hope Church of Christ, and over a dozen others. Mount Hope member Frank McReynolds, for example, consistently attends Site Council meetings for Royal Heights Elementary School, and worked with students to develop a recycling campaign, pick up recycled materials, and deliver them to a recycling center. He also serves as a lunch pal for a fifth-grade student and helps communicate the school’s needs to his congregation. Various members of the congregation come to the school to help teachers with special classroom projects.

One great example of faith involvement in [Joplin’s] schools is South Middle School and Calvary Baptist Church, which is next door and up a hill from the school. Before Bright Futures, the members of the church would talk about “that school down the hill.” After they became partners and worked together, the members began referring to South as “our school down the hill.” It’s an emotional connection that is very powerful. It’s all about people feeling welcome in the schools.

Steve Patterson, director of missions, Spring River Baptist Association and board member, Bright Futures USA

Comprehensive supports

In order to fulfill its mission of tackling poverty-related impediments to learning and transforming the education system, Bright Futures works with its coalition partners to provide a range of supports for students and their families.

Early Childhood Education.

Like many other communities employing comprehensive strategies to better meet children’s needs and boost their strengths, Bright Futures in Joplin is focused on helping families establish stronger foundations for learning for their children, especially those most likely to enter school already behind. Bright Futures leadership knew that, because many of the district’s most vulnerable kids didn’t go to center-based day care or preschool, they could not necessarily reach them through those mechanisms. They also did not want to duplicate efforts among the many organizations that were already doing great work in this area, such as the Joplin Public Library, Dolly Parton Imagination Library, Parents as Teachers, and United Way Success by Six. So they identified leaders from a few of those groups who could work together to determine ways for Bright Futures to best support those organizations in meeting their respective goals. They focused on educating adults in each child’s life about the importance of reading to them and finding convenient places to connect and engage them.²

• Reading Matters—Some at-risk students arrive at kindergarten never having held a book in their hands. In response to teachers’ concerns about the gaps they saw in literacy and other school readiness skills, Bright Futures has developed the Reading Matters campaign. Public service announcements on area radio stations that emphasize the importance of early reading are complemented by other initiatives designed to get books into the homes of low-income children and their families.³
• The Bright Futures Reading Matters Committee has also recently established another early childhood support program, to expand the health information provided to new parents to include support for early learning. The committee purchased new books, literature on the importance of reading to babies, and a promotional reusable neoprene bib with the reminder to “Read to Me: 30 minutes, Every Child, Every Day” with the goal of delivering them to every new mother in Joplin. The committee currently works with both Joplin hospitals, and works with a number of government entities, including the area Health Department, Joplin Public Library, Joplin Parents as Teachers, and LifeChoices, to consistently communicate to parents the importance of reading daily to young children. The committee hopes to secure future funding to sustain this effort going forward as well as provide similar resources to area day care providers and the parents they serve.⁴
• Little Blue Bookshelf—In partnership with United Way SW Missouri and SE Kansas, Bright Futures places age-appropriate new and gently used books in locations that are frequented by families that are unlikely to have books at home.⁵ Based on research showing that a lack of books in the home, and thus access to them, is a major barrier to poor parents’ reading to their children, the project aims to enable all parents to read to their young children at least 30 minutes every day, so that every child has enjoyed the benefit of 1,000 hours of reading by the time he or she enters kindergarten.
• Lend & Learn Library—United Way Success by Six operates a “toy library” in the Joplin United Way office, open five days a week. Parents and their pre-kindergarten aged children can play with age-appropriate toys in the library, and parents can check out toys and books to use at home. Parents also use the space to connect with one another and enable social time for kids.⁶ 
• Born Learning Trail—In summer 2015, in partnership with Target, United Way Success by Six, and the regional United Way, Joplin opened its first Born Learning Trail.⁷ The trail offers a series of outdoor games for young children and their parents and other caretakers to explore together, with opportunities to play, talk, and sing with kids and to learn about nature. Every child who attended the ribbon-cutting ceremony received a new book as a gift.
• Prekindergarten—Some Joplin preschoolers are served through the state’s pre-K program, but it has too few slots to serve all the children who would like to attend. As such, one of the goals of Bright Futures leadership is the construction of a new early-childhood learning center, which would ideally serve all children whose families request the program. Progress has begun on the center: early childhood classrooms were moved from the trailers they had occupied since the 2011 tornado to temporary space in the old Duenweg Elementary School as of fall 2016, and designs for a new 40,000-square-foot building with capacity for over 500 children, which incorporated extensive input from early childhood teachers, were put before the School Board in September.⁸ Funding for construction, estimated at $10 million, will be split, with $5 million in Community Development Block Grant funding each from the city of Joplin and the state of Missouri.

Academic Enrichment

While Bright Futures was founded with the goal of alleviating poverty-related barriers to learning, its third component, service learning, reflects the initiative’s commitment, as well, to ensuring deep and meaningful learning for all students. Over time, this precept has spurred a range of enrichment activities, both within classrooms and throughout the community, some specifically created by Bright Futures and other inspired by it directly or indirectly.

• Mentoring—Volunteers from the community have helped establish several mentoring programs to ensure that all students have the “safe adults” they need in their lives. Students who are struggling with school can get help through weekly tutoring and mentoring programs: Together Reaching Every Kid (TREK) for elementary students and Bright Futures Friends (BFF) for middle school students.⁹ And through a separate program, Positive Adults Lunching with Students (PALS), adult volunteers have lunch with at-risk students each week at school. After lunch, PALS volunteers read to, play with, or just talk to their “lunch buddies.”

“We have forged a very positive relationship that begins each week with a hug. My life is better because of the opportunity I have to sit and talk with my Lunch Buddy each week. Our recent conversations have involved everything from why cussing is bad, to understanding the importance of hand washing, and the idea that Santa still comes to your house even if you can’t get a Christmas tree.”

—adult PALS lunch buddy testimonial¹⁰

• Service Learning—In keeping with the Bright Futures’ philosophy of communities supporting and taking ownership of their schools, schools are structured to give back to communities as well. Service learning, the third leg of the initiative’s model, ensures that teachers and students enjoy the deeper learning that comes from hands-on classroom experiences. Among younger students, service learning activities might involve cleaning up trash in a local creek bed, while older students engage in more sophisticated, curriculum-enhancing activities such as collecting and analyzing water samples and providing the data to local public agencies. CJ Huff believes that this is an essential part of a 21^st century education because “true service learning is an incredible way for kids to learn about what compassionate, involved citizenship is all about.”¹¹

• Operation College Bound—For at-risk children, one obstacle to graduating from high school and transitioning to postsecondary education is a lack of early exposure to those options and to role models to whom they can relate would provide inspiration. Joplin thus adopted Operation College Bound (OCB), a program launched at Columbia Elementary School by a group of teachers who got inspired at a Model Schools Conference. The goal of OCB is to expose kindergarten through fifth-grade students to six different college campuses during their time in elementary school.¹² Through these visits students learn about careers that might be of interest to them and how higher education can help them fulfill their goals and aspirations. OCB career day brings representatives from local businesses to school to meet with students to discuss future career paths and how a college education fits those paths.

• Transitions Programs—Research shows that transitions from elementary to middle school and from middle to high school are the most vulnerable points for at-risk students—the times when they are most likely to check out mentally and drop out physically. Bright Futures Joplin has been working to smooth those transitions and better support students through two peer-to-peer programs: Where Everybody Belongs (WEB) for the transition to middle school and Fusion for students who are moving to high school. The goal is to help younger students acclimate and get and stay engaged in their new schools. This program enjoys support from faith-based youth leaders, relevant human service agencies, and several business/corporate sponsors.

Fusion in particular has been enormously successful. We’ve had Fusion students come present to our board and do a better job than many of my banker friends! The experience it gives these students is incredible. They are taught leadership and mentoring skills that will improve their lives forever.—Peggy Fuller 

• New Schools Designed to Foster Academic, Behavioral, and Social Development and enhance college, career, and life readiness—The tornado that ripped through Joplin in May 2011, devastating a large share of the city and leveling two schools, also provided new opportunities in its wake. A combination of insurance proceeds, donations, local taxes, grants, and tornado relief funding enabled the district to build five new schools. Schools Superintendent CJ Huff leveraged those funds to improve conditions for some of the district’s most disadvantaged students and to design new schools that would drive 21^st century learning goals.

The new Soaring Heights School serves both elementary and middle school students in a combined building that takes advantage of economies of scale, such as a shared kitchen and state-of-the-art auditorium, while keeping younger and older students separate for academic, sports, and other activities. Low-income students from an old and run-down school were redistricted so that they would be among the primary beneficiaries of this beautiful new school filled with natural light and chock-full of smart spaces inspired by teachers’ suggestions, from “fidget chairs” in classrooms to a glassed-in “outdoor classroom” that can be opened to let in fresh air on nice days and used virtually year-round.

The new Joplin High School, which opened its doors in September 2014 after two years of construction, houses five distinct career path academies, which are designed to ensure that students are academically ready for postsecondary learning or jobs and that they have the broader set of abilities needed to succeed in those contexts, including succeeding in skilled work. The centers range from the STEM-focused Franklin Technology Center to a performing arts academy. The latter houses not only classrooms and performance space for drama, band, choir, orchestra, and debate students, but “also includes a 1,250-seat auditorium that will continue to bear the name of former music teacher T. Frank Coulter; a black-box theater with indoor and outdoor seating; music rehearsal halls with sound-isolating practice rooms; and a community safe room that will be open to the public during stormy weather.”¹³ These investments were among the factors that led the U.S. Department of Education to include Joplin on its fall 2015 list of just nine districts deemed to be “future ready.”¹⁴

Wraparound supports

Wraparound supports are at the heart of Bright Futures’ mission of alleviating poverty-related barriers to teaching and learning. These have focused mainly on ensuring that immediate needs are met, as per the first of the initiative’s three core precepts, but also extend to longer-term concerns.

• Addressing Immediate Student Needs—The first of the three Bright Futures components explained earlier is a three-tiered system of supports to meet students’ basic needs within 24 hours—so that students are not distracted by unmet needs but can focus on their studies. Use of existing human service agencies is the cornerstone of the effort, with effective communication among and between agencies essential. Awareness of which agencies are available and what they can provide is key, as is the facilitation of regular meetings among providers. The agencies’ representation on the district Bright Futures Advisory Board and on school-based Bright Futures Councils also helps. In addition, a donation center called Darla’s Room is stocked with clothing, shoes, school supplies, and other donated items for use by teachers, counselors, and other school staff. In order to meet more unusual needs, Bright Futures employs a second tier, the Bright Futures Joplin Facebook page. Through it under-resourced students have secured such items as a pair of size 13 steel-toed work boots needed for a new welding class and a suit and dress shoes for a job interview.

A third tier, the Eagle Angel Fund, provides backup support to the first two, as determined by the Joplin Advisory Board. It is noteworthy that the need to draw on this fund has diminished over time, as the first two tiers have gained strength through better alignment of community resources and communications among agencies. Today, the fund is typically used for “gap funding” to provide immediate financial support to high-need families (for rent, utilities, etc.) while Bright Futures Leadership gets the right agencies involved to provide support.

• Health—Through partnerships, various health care providers in the school district volunteer services to support needy children’s well-being. The services may include conducting a physical exam to enable a student to participate in an after-school activity, dental services for a student with a cavity, or even mental health services for a student coping with trauma or other issues.¹⁵
• Nutrition—Through the Snack Pack program, children who need them receive weekend backpacks filled with food and snack items so that they do not go hungry on weekend days when school meals are unavailable. Community volunteers get together each week to stuff over 500 snack packs with items that are donated by churches and local businesses; the cost per pack is about $5. A nutritionist and the district food services department work to ensure that the food is both nutritious and shelf-stable.¹⁶

When I first heard about Bright Futures, I was elated to learn our schools were teaming up with faith-based and business partners that would be working together with social services in our community to meet both immediate and long-term student needs. We had never had anyone outside of our parent-teacher organization show concern about our students in this way. Teachers were so used to seeing a need in our classroom and running to a store after school to purchase an item(s) for a student or recognizing a need but not being able to meet it for monetary reasons. When Bright Futures was put in place, teachers simply needed to verbalize a need to our counselor, make a phone call, or send a quick email to have the need met. We were amazed at how quickly needs were met. Clothing needs were met within hours. The support from our community had never been stronger. We (educators) had a tremendous weight lifted off our shoulders. We had dozens upon dozens of people loving our students and filling needs. We had students who were sleeping on their couches or receiving their first bed. Students received backpacks full of school supplies. Schools were asked to make room so Bright Futures could stock our shelves with extra school supplies. We no longer had to worry if our students would be warm enough as they walked to and from school because they were given coats, sweatshirts, and stocking caps. Families were given food baskets for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Parents were given presents to place under the tree for their children.

Brandi Landis, teacher, Kelsey Norman Elementary School 

Family and Community Engagement

To cultivate and build community ownership of and leadership for schools, Bright Futures establishes Bright Futures Councils in each school building. The councils, which operate independently under the direction of the principal, include a mix of business, human services, and faith-based partners, as well as parents. They meet with the school periodically (monthly or quarterly, depending on the needs of the school) to discuss how to help school leadership and staff address needs and reach their goals. Members of the councils, who are considered partners, vary across schools. Following are some examples.¹⁷

• Cecil Floyd Elementary—Three churches (St. Paul’s United Methodist Church, New Creation Church, and Grace Baptist Church), three businesses (Qdoba, Casey’s General Store, and Snodgrass Collision), Legal Aid of Western Mississippi, and two local nonprofits (Independent Living Center, which serves individuals with disabilities, and Lafayette House, which works to end domestic violence and sexual assault) serve on the council for this school.
• East Middle School—This school’s council members hail from Wildwood Baptist Church, the neighborhood Walgreens, US Bank, Hampshire Pet Products, the Kyle Hickham Agency, and Missouri Southern State University.
• Joplin High School—This school’s council members come from First Presbyterian, First United Methodist, and Fellowship Baptist Churches, as well as Young Life, a youth ministry program; several health care institutions, including Freeman Health Systems, Mercy, Ascent Recovery Residences, and Orthopedic Specialists of the Four States; businesses, including Qdoba, Walgreens, LifeChoices, Allgeier, Martin & Associates, and Able Body Manufacturing; and Missouri Southern State University, which has also been involved in supporting Bright Futures in other capacities.

Bright Futures also leads a Leadership Academy program which provides community members with intensive leadership training, instructing them on how the Joplin School District works, giving them a chance to ask questions of district leaders, and guiding them to explore how their actions can help improve students’ lives and the district. The academy covers such topics as poverty and the impact it has on learning, how the leadership structure of the district works, and the district’s vision for the future.

Practices and Policies

The ability of Bright Futures to improve student and school achievement, and, recently, to scale up and spread to dozens of districts across seven states (as of 2016), is due in large part to specific internal practices as well as district, state, and federal policies that support this work.

Community engagement

As discussed above, meaningful engagement of the entire community—from parents of children in schools to leaders in the social services, business, and faith fields—is central to the Bright Futures strategy. Indeed, the assumption that superintendents and other local leaders will come and go, a reality that poses challenges to school improvement efforts in districts across the country, makes cultivating leadership among a broader set of stakeholders critical to longevity.

One challenge Bright Futures encountered from the start was trying to avoid duplicating existing efforts in its community engagement work. “There are tons of organizations already providing these services,” notes board member Peggy Fuller, clarifying that the initiative’s job is to “let folks know that these exist, and then to fill the gaps where they don’t.” She cites as an example, Crosslines, a “great community organization that provides clothing and household goods to families in need. Before Bright Futures, a counselor who saw a child wearing flip flops in January might say ‘Tell mommy to go to Crosslines and get shoes,’ but a mom working the factory line at Pillsbury can’t get to a place open from 10-2. So Bright Futures gives kid shoes now, and then mom has time to get to Crosslines for other needs in the future.”¹⁸

Time, Talent, and Treasure

Bright Futures relies on the “three Ts” that it believes are abundant (in varying proportions) in every community: time, talent, and treasure. Acknowledging that the districts in which it operates are not wealthy ones, and that many are struggling, Bright Futures USA Board member and local pastor Steve Patterson maintains that even the poorest community members, whether individuals, churches, or small businesses, have something to give in the form of one or more of those Ts. One especially vivid example is a school assembly that superintendent Huff attended at Emerson Elementary in Joplin, one of his most impoverished schools, in January 2011. When he walked in, Huff noticed that every student was wearing a knitted stocking cap, all of them different colors, some with stripes and others not, but all clearly handmade. When he asked a parent to explain the story behind the hats, she told him that two older women, members of the poorest of the town’s Baptist churches, had hand knitted the hats for every child in the school. With winter coming, knowing that many families were struggling to put aside even a few dollars for gifts, the Bright Futures Council at Emerson realized that this was a need that must be met.

“These two ladies took it upon themselves to tap into their time, talent, and treasure (yarn) to meet the need of stocking caps for every child. The result was a warm and very colorful group of students who saw how much their community cares for them and are likely to be eager to give back.”¹⁹

CJ Huff, former superintendent, Joplin School District

Challenges

While Bright Futures can count many successes in Joplin and in its work with other Missouri affiliate districts, some policies have served as obstacles in certain areas and prevented further scaling up.

Prekindergarten. While Missouri receives relatively high marks from the National Institute for Early Education Research for the quality of its pre-K program—meeting 8 of 10 benchmarks— the state ranks below average on per-pupil spending for pre-K and near the bottom, 39^th of 50 states, on access. Pre-K reached only 30 percent of the state’s school districts in 2015 and served just four percent of Missouri 4-year-olds and two percent of 3-year-olds.²⁰ As discussed above, Joplin parents who want to send their children to pre-K have access to a program in only one elementary school, thus the need for Bright Futures leadership to work toward opening a new early childhood center.

School funding. The Education Law Center’s National Report Card places Missouri in the middle of the pack with respect to per-pupil funding in 2012; it ranked 29 of 50 states at $9,529.²¹ But that level puts it much closer to the lowest-spending states, Utah and Idaho, which invest roughly $6,500 per student, than the highest spenders, Alaska, New Jersey, and New York, which spend roughly double that of Missouri. Moreover, Missouri ranks close to dead last with respect to equity in funding among school districts, earning an “F” as one of the six most regressive states in the country. Rather than using state funding to compensate for inequities due to disparities in local property tax revenues, Missouri has a state funding scheme that compounds those inequities, channeling more funds to already wealthier and lower-needs schools, and depriving schools struggling to serve poor students—like many of those in Joplin—with the resources they need to do so effectively.

Political. Even in politically progressive school districts, it can be difficult to establish systems that compensate for the disadvantages that children living in poverty face. So the ability of Bright Futures to garner widespread support for the notion that “all children are our children” and that the community has a responsibility to ensure their well-being is particularly noteworthy. That support is not universal, however. In March 2016, at a forum for candidates for the Joplin School Board, while four prospective members expressed strong support for the continued work of Bright Futures, three others vocally opposed it. The latter candidates argue that it is not the community’s responsibility, but rather that of families, to address children’s needs, and urged an end to some of the funding that is fundamental to Bright Futures efforts.²² Subsequent battles between Bright Futures and the school board led Bright Futures leadership to establish an independent home for its funding.²³

Staffing. Very limited dedicated funding for Bright Futures, due both to the political challenges described above and lack of major philanthropic support, means that staffing is minimal. As of the 2016–2017 school year, a single director manages Bright Futures in Joplin, so some projects that might have been adopted and successfully run with more personnel are not feasible. For example, Bright Futures had previously worked with teachers and schools to produce and sell Chrismas cards that local businesses could customize, with proceeds going to support families unable to afford holiday meals or gifts. But given the project’s time-intensive nature, demands on teachers at the very start of the school year, and relatively small return, the program will cease unless a group of dedicated volunteers adopts it.²⁴

Funding

As a relatively new initiative, Bright Futures USA has not yet secured funding from major national philanthropic foundations or from federal government grants. It thus cannot leverage those sources to support affiliates, but relies on a combination of state and local public and private funds, including corporate support. These sources include all funding since 2010:

• Public (grants, Title I funding directed to Bright Futures efforts, etc.)
  • The Corporation for National Community Service (Americorps)²⁵ funded year-long volunteer positions for three years, enabling Bright Futures to place VISTA members in some affiliate communities, to move the initiative along at a more rapid rate locally, and to place some volunteers in the home office to help develop processes, search out best practices, and share them across the network.
  • State Department of Education funds were designated to expand the program throughout the state of Missouri.
  • State Department of Economic Development funds supported trainings at the Bright Futures annual conference.
  • The Economic Security Corporation of Southwest Missouri supported trainings, in particular on poverty education, at the conference.
• Private (foundation, corporate, and/or individual grants)
  • AT&T, which has a focus on dropout prevention, along with Daryl and Patricia Deel, the David Parks Revocable Trust, DLR Group, Southwest Missouri Bank, and Walmart all provided funds to support general program expansion.
  • American Century Investments Foundation and the Jean Jack & Mildred Lemons Charitable Trust supported programming for reading tutors, mentorship, and Operation College Bound.
  • The United Way of Southwest Missouri and Wells Fargo helped fund Rebuild Joplin (an organization born out of Bright Futures after the tornado)

Indicators of Progress

Bright Futures leaders believe that test scores, and even broader metrics of academic progress, are only some of the measures of student well-being against which schools, districts, and states should be assessed. Moreover, while Joplin is among many districts focused on raising graduation rates, other Bright Futures districts target a diverse range of goals, from increasing the number of low-income students taking Advanced Placement courses to reducing student suicides. Bright Futures leadership thus works with each affiliate to identify metrics of relevance to that district, and encourage funders to broaden the scope of indicators of student progress they use to decide what to fund and how to gauge the efficacy of their investments.

Academic Gains

Joplin’s leaders also recognize that basic academic measures, including test scores and graduation rates, are among the benchmarks by which schools and districts are judged, and the district has seen substantial progress on those since Bright Futures began.

• Scores on the ACT, widely considered to be a key measure of “college and career readiness,” increased by 14 percent among students who qualify for free-and-reduced-price lunches, from an average of 17.74 in 2008 to 20.19 in 2012.²⁶ This means that Joplin’s low-income 12^th graders improved from the “not good” range to slightly above the national average during the first years of Bright Futures implementation. The increase in the share of low-income seniors taking the ACT was even more impressive: that figure rose by 242 percent over those years.²⁷
• The high school graduation rate increased from 73 percent in 2008 to 87 percent in 2015.²⁸ Joplin’s graduation rate also rose at a much higher rate than that of the state as a whole, from 77 percent to 87 percent between 2012 and 2015 (a 13 percent increase), versus from 84 percent to 88 percent (a 5 percent increase) across Missouri.²⁹
• Over those same years, the cohort dropout rate fell from 6.4 percent to 2.8 percent.³⁰ Joplin’s African-American students made slightly greater progress than Joplin students overall (the rate fell from 6.9 percent to 2.5 percent) and there were smaller but still substantial gains for Hispanic students, for whom the dropout rate fell from 5.2 percent to 3.8 percent.³¹

Other Gains

The new partnerships and supports Bright Futures has brought to the district are evident both in increased engagement and improved outcomes for students.

• Volunteerism is up substantially as are the services volunteers are able to provide. Between 2008 and 2012, community partnerships increased by 850 percent, from just 34 to 289.³² District-wide volunteerism rose over 700 percent from 2008 to 2012, with nearly 1,000 new volunteers working in schools across the district. One result of this is that 194 more adults are now serving as mentors and tutors than five years ago. As of 2012, Bright Futures was able to serve over 690 food insecure children through its “Snackpack” program.
• Attendance, a proxy for student engagement and important predictor of achievement, likewise increased over this time period for all students, while the racial and ethnic gap in attendance closed.³³ Joplin High School attendance rates increased 3.7 percentage points between 2008 and 2012, rising from 91.3 percent to 95 percent overall. Black students, who had lagged their white peers by 1.5 percentage points, saw that gap close, with attendance increasing from 92.5 to 96 percent. Hispanic students, too, closed the gap with their white peers, as their attendance rate rose from 94 to 95.5 percent.
• Reportable discipline incidents dropped by more than a third over the same period, from 3,648 in 2008 to 2,376 in 2012.³⁴
• Service learning is having a powerful impact on kids and the community:
  • Franklin Technology Center: Joplin High School students at the Franklin Tech center engage in a variety of high-end service projects that leverage students’ evolving science and tech (and more general handyman/woman) skills. For example, in March 2013, a group of students helped install heating and air conditioning for the Watered Gardens expansion of a women’s shelter and in September they built and installed hand rails on the entrance of the new addition.
  • Support for Moore, Oklahoma students: Two years after the tornado devastated much of their town and several of their schools, Joplin students learned of similar devastation in Moore, Oklahoma. In addition to losing their school, students in Plaza Towers Elementary School had lost seven classmates who were killed by the tornado. Soon after that, Joplin fifth-graders independently developed a plan to raise funds and books for a replacement library for the Moore students. The presentation even included the cost of renting a bus, including gas and tolls, to transport the Joplin students so that they could deliver the gifts and talk with the Moore students about their own experiences healing from the tornado. The result was so heartwarming that the Today Show sent a reporter to cover it.

“Although most Bright Futures councils are composed of adults in business, faith-based, and human service communities along with school representatives, the Royal Heights [Elementary School] council is testing out a new concept—students as leaders and decision makers! The service learning/Bright Futures council changed its structure the 2013/2014 school year beginning with a service project and has been going strong ever since. Over the summer they researched community organizations and needs that exist, volunteered at various locations, and even received a State Farm grant to help their cause of helping others. This group also identified the need for curbside recycling in our community. They researched the issue, marketed their ideas, and are now encouraging everyone to get registered, and then get out and vote on Proposition A at the April 8, 2014 election. The Proposition missed passing by a small margin but we couldn’t be more proud of their efforts.”³⁵

Principal Jill White, Royal Heights Elementary School

Community and Policy Reach

Just over five years after Bright Futures began in Joplin, it has expanded substantially in terms of both scope and reach/impact.

• Growth, numbers, and new interest: By the time Bright Futures hosted its third annual conference in March 2016, it was attracting over 800 people from nine states. Participants included representatives from most of its then-40 affiliated districts across seven states—Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Iowa, Virginia, and North Carolina—as well as people from 67 other, non-affiliate districts. The conference also brought together 75 district superintendents, for whom Bright Futures sponsored a separate working lunch. (As of September 2016, Bright Futures leaders were working with eight additional communities that have since expressed an interest in moving toward affiliation.)
• Regional impact: Communities are working together to pool resources to support kids across districts. This regional collaboration was on display at the conference, where Carl Junction, Missouri, won a Bright Futures Affiliate of the Year award for its success in getting needed winter coats to neighboring affiliate Avilla, a community of only 100 or so residents.
• Awards: Bright Futures in Joplin and the Joplin school district have also received numerous local, state, and national awards.
  • State: Missouri National Education Association Horace Mann Award
  • National: American School Board Journal Magna Award, Together for Tomorrow recognition by the White House, Corporation for National and Community Service, and Future-Ready School District designation by the United States Department of Education. On May 21, 2012, one day before the one-year anniversary of the devastating tornado, President Barack Obama delivered the graduation commencement address to Joplin High School.³⁶
  • Business: ³⁷
    • In the fall of 2012, Gov. Jay Nixon announced a $1 million grant to the Joplin Area Chamber of Commerce Foundation to help establish an Innovation Campus at Joplin High School / Franklin Technology Center. The goal of the Innovation Campus program is to help under-resourced students prepare for success in college and careers. Through the program, the Joplin Area Chamber of Commerce, Missouri Southern State University, and Crowder College partner with JHS/FTC to offer numerous dual credit courses to students and to help qualifying students pay for these courses through grants. Dual credit courses enable students to earn college credit while still in high school, giving them a jump start on college and saving them time and money.
    • Joplin HS earned the Apple award through 2017, its second such award.³⁸

Bright Futures has been a blessing in our community, not just to the students we impact every day, but to adults like me whose lives have been dramatically enriched by the privilege of being involved.

—Peggy Fuller, 2015 Bright Futures Community Champion

Contact: Kim Vann, Executive Director, Bright Futures USA, [email protected], or Peggy Fuller, former Co-Chair of the Bright Futures Joplin Advisory Board, [email protected]

Endnotes

1. SF Gate, “Damage from Joplin, MO tornado: $2.8 billion.” May 20, 2012. http://www.sfgate.com/nation/article/Damage-from-Joplin-Mo-tornado-2-8-billion-3571524.php#photo-2958987

2. Elaine Weiss conversation with Peggy Fuller, October 17, 2016.

3. Bright Futures Joplin, Reading Matters. http://brightfuturesjoplin.org/reading-matters/

4. Email correspondence with Peggy Fuller, Oct. 14, 2016.

5. United Way, Little Blue Bookshelf Project. http://www.unitedwaymokan.org/little-blue-bookshelf-project

6. United Way Success by 6 Southwest MO and Southeast KS Facebook page. https://www.facebook.com/mokansuccessby6/photos/a.1580597875523760.1073741828.1534101920173356/1652010005049213/?type=3&theater

7. United Way Success by 6 Southwest MO and Southeast KS Facebook page. https://www.facebook.com/mokansuccessby6/photos/pb.1534101920173356.-2207520000.1448325820./1626367797613434/?type=3&theater

8. “The new building will have a capacity of about 260 students in the morning session and 260 in the afternoon session. In addition to early childhood education programs, it also will offer half-day day care options to families that are already enrolled in the preschool session.” Emily Younker, “Joplin early childhood staff elated to use Duenweg school, even temporarily; Design for new early childhood center completed, ready for board approval.” Joplin Globe. August 22, 2016. http://www.joplinglobe.com/news/local_news/joplin-early-childhood-staff-elated-to-use-duenweg-school-even/article_3b3c2e8c-3f2b-5beb-9928-3c32f177bc36.html

9. Bright Futures Joplin TREK webpage. http://brightfuturesjoplin.org/trek/

10. Bright Futures Joplin PALS webpage. http://brightfuturesjoplin.org/pals/

11. Conversation with Elaine Weiss, September 2016.

12. Operation College Bound Facebook page. https://www.facebook.com/OperationCollegeBound?fref=ts

13. Younker 2016.

14. “Joplin school district earns future ready, Apple awards,” Joplin Globe. Nov. 26, 2015. http://www.joplinglobe.com/news/local_news/joplin-school-district-earns-future-ready-apple-awards/article_76065bbc-12c4-5d5b-88bb-9a7af43ef101.html

15. District leadership had been hoping to add a school-based health center in one of the schools, but the School Board rejected that proposal.

16. Bright Futures Joplin Snack-Pack webpage. http://brightfuturesjoplin.org/snack-pack/

17. Bright Futures Joplin School partners webpage. http://brightfuturesjoplin.org/school-partners/

18. Peggy Fuller conversation with Elaine Weiss, October 17, 2016.

19. Conversation with Elaine Weiss, September 2016.

20. National Institute for Early Education Research. Rutgers University. State Pre-K Yearbook, 2015,  108-109. http://nieer.org/sites/nieer/files/Missouri_2015_rev1.pdf

21. Bruce Baker, David Sciarra, and Danielle Farrie. Is School Funding Fair? A National Report Card. Spring 2015. Education Law Center. http://www.schoolfundingfairness.org/National_Report_Card_2015.pdf

22. Emily Younker, “School board debates Bright Futures request for salary support,” Joplin Globe. May 10, 2016. http://www.joplinglobe.com/news/local_news/joplin-school-board-debates-bright-futures-request-for-salary-support/article_5f654fa1-9155-50c5-8301-68e5907fd1f2.html

23. Because the Bright Futures budget was housed within the school district budget under an “activities” line item (in order to avoid having to file as an independent 501(c)(3) and undergo associated logistical and financial barriers), the board was able to prevent it from spending as needed, including on staff, forcing cut-backs. BF leadership responded by reaching out to the Community Foundation for the Ozarks to ask it to act as Bright Futures’ fiscal agent. They have since engaged in fundraising specifically for Bright Futures to ensure that spending can be done independently according to the initiative’s specific needs. Conversation with Peggy Fuller, October 17, 2016.

24. Elaine Weiss conversation with Peggy Fuller, October 17, 2016.

25. This is federal funding that is passed down through state agencies/offices.

26. CJ Huff, application for state superintendent of the year, 2013. Data from ACT Profile report, internal Joplin data. The composite ACT score did not change over this time. It stayed steady at 22, but that is essentially a gain, considering that most of the new test-takers are from disadvantaged backgrounds.

27. CJ Huff, application for state superintendent of the year, 2013. Data from ACT Profile report, internal Joplin data.

28. Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, Comprehensive Data System. https://mcds.dese.mo.gov/quickfacts/SitePages/DistrictInfo.aspx?ID=__bk8100030043009300130043008300

29. Scores among disadvantaged subgroups such as black and Hispanic students and students eligible for free and reduced-price lunches also increased substantially, but most of those numbers are too small to detect reliable trends over time. https://dese.mo.gov/top-10-20/data-dashboard.

30. We use the cohort dropout rate rather than the single-year or other dropout rates because it is a more accurate assessment of the performance of a given group of students over time.

31. https://mcds.dese.mo.gov/quickfacts/Pages/Student-Characteristics.aspx.

32. These are from internal data collected by Bright Futures during those years.

33. These are from internal data collected by Bright Futures and school leadership during those years.

34. These are from internal data collected by Bright Futures and school leadership during those years.

35. Bright Futures Joplin Service Learning webpage. http://brightfuturesjoplin.org/service-learning/

36. CJ Huff biography, Executive Speakers Bureau, http://www.executivespeakers.com/speaker/CJ_Huff#sthash.3Zc3QYmP.dpuf.

37. http://jhs.joplinschools.org/about_j_h_s/college__career___technology_focus

38. “Joplin school district earns future ready, Apple awards.” The Apple award “recognizes outstanding schools and programs worldwide for innovation, leadership, and educational excellence.” Its five criteria include: Visionary Leadership, Innovative Learning and Teaching, Ongoing Professional Learning, Compelling Evidence of Success, and a Flexible Learning Environment. http://www.apple.com/education/apple-distinguished-schools/

Eastern Kentucky, at the center of Appalachia, has long been one of the highest-poverty regions of the United States. In the 1960s, widespread hunger and poor health in Appalachia helped spur the federal War on Poverty, and in the decades since, the gradual declines of the coal industry, and of small farming and light manufacturing, backbones of the region’s economy, have kept poverty high even as it fell substantially across the nation. In the past few years, as much of the rest of the country has recovered from the big recession, the area has been further hit as some of the last remaining coal mines shut down and associated businesses, like CSX railways, which provided the towns’ only well-paid jobs, left.¹
In 2015, the poverty rate in the region’s smallest county, Owsley County, was nearly 40 percent, median household income was just under $21,000, and over one quarter of households were living on $10,000 or less.² In 2000, when the share of Americans with no more than a high school diploma had fallen to 20 percent, almost 36 percent of adults across Appalachia were in that status, and only 41 percent had any college education, and fewer than one in five Appalachian adults had attained a bachelor’s degree, versus 51 percent and nearly one in four Americans overall, respectively.³

Schools in Clay, Jackson, Knox, Owsley, and Perry counties suffered not only major declines in population, but a shift over those decades from largely intact families to situations like that of Clay’s Big Creek Elementary School, where at least half the 220 students do not live with either biological parent. Virtually every child in the region has been touched by drug abuse, and many have parents who are emotionally absent or physically gone – in jail or dead of an overdose. Beyond their impact on test scores, some principals report trauma-driven spikes in chronic absenrce and behavioral problems as students find it impossible to get to school and, when they can, to focus on what is going on in class. Compounding all of these challenges, teachers and principals in Eastern Kentucky struggle to engage parents in their children’s educations given those parents’ own lack of education, distrust of schools and teachers, and an attitude among some that college is unnecessary, an intrusion into family cohesion, or both.

There is no kid in Owsley County who doesn’t know someone who’s been affected by drug abuse. Because the area is so deprived of everything, no jobs, no access, more and more people are turning to drugs. How do you get kids to think about even going to class when mom or dad could be overdosing at home right now?

– Frankie-Jo B. Berea College sophomore and Owsley County High School graduate.

Response

Unlike other areas of Appalachia that have been ravaged by job loss and drug addiction, this region benefits from a unique institution with a history of investing in education as a way to counter the forces of poverty and isolation that impede its residents’ success. Established in 1855 by ardent abolitionists who envisioned it as the “Oberlin of Kentucky,” serving men and women, blacks and whites, Berea College is the only leading higher education institution in the country to guarantee virtually debt-free college degrees to all of its students.⁴ The small liberal-arts college admits only “academically promising” students from low-income backgrounds, most from Appalachia, and charges no tuition.

In 1967, Berea established a new department, since renamed Partners for Education (PfE), to manage Berea’s new Upward Bound program. Today, Partners for Education collaborates with schools, families and community partners on over a dozen federally funded programs to meet the educational needs of nearly 40,000 students in southeastern Kentucky. Its core service area includes Madison county (its home county), eight counties that are part of a rural Promise Zone (Bell, Clay, Harlan, Knox Leslie, Letcher, Perry and Whitley) and Jackson and Owsley counties, which were part of the original rural Promise Neighborhoods. Partners also supports the educational needs of students in an additional 21 counties, primarily through the federally funded GEAR UP program. PfE’s model is built around four key strategies: Engaging Families, Lifting Educational Aspirations, Building Academic Skills and Connecting College and Career.

Organization/Coalition

Because Partners for Education has been working for 50 years to cultivate partnerships with a diverse range of community organizations, it was uniquely positioned to develop a coalition to comprehensively serve the region’s students and families. Coalition partners include those who serve both the broad region and a more intensively supported, four-county section of it, as described below.

In 2011, Partners for Education (PfE) received the first federal Promise Neighborhood grant for a rural community. Unlike many other federal grants, Promise Neighborhood grants set out clear guidelines regarding what recipient communities were responsible to monitor and deliver in terms of data and outcomes, but offer substantial flexibility as to how programs are implemented in order to produce those outcomes. As such, PfE was able to expand strategies it already employed to serve its rural population as well as to work with communities in the three-county PN region to come up with new ones. After demonstrating successful implementation and substantial progress in kindergarten readiness and proficiency on state language and math assessments with its first four-year grant, PfE obtained a second Promise Neighborhood grant in December 2016 that allowed it to bring the approach to a fourth county, Knox.⁵

Leadership

Partners for Education is led by Executive Director Dreama Gentry, who also established the department at Berea College. Gentry is the architect of Partner’s approach to improving educational opportunities within the region and has proven particularly adept at weaving together various funding streams to create cradle-to-career supports for children and youth living in rural areas. She is joined in that work by two associate executive directors, Mike Hogg and Penny Jordan. Hogg, the chief operating officer, is tasked with overseeing facilities, developing staff, and linking the work of programs to best serve students. Jordan oversees the strategic initiatives team, which includes grant services, communications and special projects. Much of her team’s work is geared toward identifying new opportunities to serve the region and strengthening regional partnerships.

Core Partners

Core partners include both public/agency partners and private implementation partners. The former consists mainly of education institutions: primary and secondary schools and school districts in its 26-county service region, as well as several institutions of higher education, including Eastern Kentucky University, Somerset Community College, and Hazard Community and Technical College. As discussed below, initiatives established under the 1990 Kentucky Education Reform Act have also played important roles in boosting the efforts of PfE and its allies. These efforts are also supported by key private nonprofit organizations—such as Save the Children and the Collaborative for Teaching and Learning—that provide a variety of services including tutoring, program evaluation, and family supports.

Staff

Partners for Education employs a cohort of full-time staff to oversee the logistics and operations of its various programs and to support students and families. Most of the staff members have previously worked in education and social service fields in the region—some for decades—and many are graduates of Berea College: Berea College Partners for Education employs 10 family engagement specialists, who meet directly with families and help to coordinate services. In addition, three family partnership staff members support the specialists in their work. The major staff contribution comes from the 83 specialists hired by the College to provide academic, college preparatory, and wraparound services to students across Berea’s extended service region. Dozens of contractors and a number of Berea College students also provide support. All of the staff are led by project directors who manage the day-to-day operation of each of PfE’s major initiatives and report to either the family partnership director or one of three team leads.

Volunteers

The staff are complemented by a large volunteer corps that works in multiple areas of Berea’s PfE initiative. Several AmeriCorps grants provide Partners for Education with 105 AmeriCorps volunteers, who work full-time in select middle and high schools. In addition, the federally funded Volunteer Income Tax Assistance Program (VITA), run by PfE for its service region, trains volunteers each year to provide free help with income tax preparation to residents of Eastern Kentucky. And the Governor’s Commonwealth Institute for Parent Leadership trains parents to become volunteer advocates for public schools. Finally, both directly and through its partner organizations, PfE enlists college students as mentors and tutors, who interact with students both in person and electronically over Skype.

Comprehensive supports

Modeled loosely on the Harlem Children’s Zone, Promise Neighborhoods’ cradle-to-career supports are designed to wrap services around children and their families from birth to college and beyond. Based on the premise that students at high risk of academic, and thus life, failure, are disadvantaged by disparities in resources and in opportunities to learn (support and opportunity gaps), PfE and other Promise Neighborhood grantees work across their communities to identify, leverage, align, and, where needed, develop supports to fill those gaps.

Given extensive needs and few resources in Eastern Kentucky, PfE must figure out how to best address those needs given its limited resources. Communications director J. Morgan says that

As PfE developed, we have been faced by the question of how best to serve the region. Should we be as engaged as possible in as many eastern Kentucky counties as possible, or should we focus our efforts on providing deep levels of support (with help from partners) in a smaller region? The current thinking is that we will continue with college access work across the region but that we will have a smaller footprint for our more intensive projects. Currently that footprint includes the eight Promise Zone counties, Jackson and Owsley from the original Promise Neighborhood, and our home county, Madison.

Early Childhood Education

The gaps that disproportionately prevent children growing up in poverty from succeeding in school begin long before they enter kindergarten. In Appalachia, the disadvantages that many children face include parents with little education and a lack of knowledge about child development and the parenting skills needed to make that development healthy; lack of resources to pay for quality child care and private preschool (along with the lack of options for well-funded public childcare facilities), and physical and mental health needs that go unaddressed. As such, Partners for Education collaborates with a range of community and regional partners to fill those gaps and help more children be fully ready for kindergarten.

Birth-to-3

Through the Promise Neighborhood grant, PfE was able to help Save the Children, which works to improve health and educational outcomes for young children, expand its work in Clay, Jackson, and Owsley counties. Many families with children ages birth-to-three participate in Early Steps to School Success, a Save the Children Program aimed at preparing students to enter kindergarten ready to learn through a combination of home visits, book exchanges, “transition to school” activities, and programs to help parents develop knowledge and skills to support child development and create strong family-school relationships.

PfE also works with Community Early Childhood Councils to host activities and events such as Week of the Young Child, the Dolly Parton Imagination Library, and Kindergarten Transition Programs, as well as to disseminate child development information to parents.

State pre-k

Low-income children across Kentucky benefit from the state’s high-quality pre-kindergarten program, which is among the country’s best resourced and most accessible.⁶ Indeed, Kentucky was an early pioneer in pre-k investments and has expanded over the past 20 years to serve one quarter of the state’s four-year-olds and nearly one in ten of its three-year-olds. The rural nature of the counties served by PfE, however, limits access for Clay, Jackson, Knox, and Owsley County preschoolers to these quality programs. Knox County, the largest of the four, has 13 elementary schools, Clay has 7, Jackson has 3, and Owsley, which serves only 693 students in all, has just one. Lack of space for prekindergarten classrooms is thus a challenge, and many of the children whose families want to enroll them cannot get slots.

Transportation poses a second challenge; many of these children must ride 30 or even 40 minutes each way by bus to get to the schools, and some parents are reluctant to put small children on a bus for such a long time. And some other families either live in such remote locations that it is not an option or encounter so much stress in their daily lives that they cannot manage the preschool application, let alone getting their children to the schools.

Readiness buses

In Clay County, PfE obtained a grant from the Kellogg Foundation to serve some of the young children most in need of preschool enrichment who cannot get to the schools. They devised an innovative solution to the multiple barriers standing between children and early education: two buses that have been specially retrofitted as preschool classrooms to serve young children and their parents/ caretakers.

The buses arrive at the homes of designated families once a week for a one-hour session that is divided between time that parents, children, and the two early childhood specialists spend together and a half-hour session in which the child learns with a teacher while the parent works on family goal-setting, child development, parenting skills, and other topics that help both him/her and the child move toward kindergarten readiness and family well-being. This enables PfE to serve families in very remote areas, to provide families with child development information, to act as liaisons between parents and schools to facilitate family engagement, and to connect the most vulnerable parents with other critical supports, both social and financial, thus enriching the whole household and further advancing children’s school readiness. Tennant Kirk, who directs early childhood initiatives for Partners for Education, describes the buses’ importance:

“By working with parents to create their own unique family goals, the early education specialists design a process that strengthens the well-being of the family enabling them to raise healthy children who are ready learn in kindergarten.”⁷

Training and PD for early childhood caretakers and educators

Leveraging a new state law that evaluates preschool classrooms using a broader set of metrics, PfE designed a system around experienced early childhood coaches who could help early childhood providers meet the standards for teacher-student relationships and classroom environment. Tennant Kirk,  notes that “the initiative really helped teachers enrich environments and understand how to use resources and materials to optimize children’s growth and development. It had a powerful impact; we saw immediate and profound gains in child outcomes.”⁸ Big Creek ES principal Nadine Couch says training for ECE teachers has been a tremendous asset for her kids and school.⁹

Head Start and Early Head Start

Clay County has both an Early Head Start and a Head Start program, as well as two Head Start/public preschool blended classrooms serving more rural parts of the county. Differing program requirements make blending challenging, but also creates more opportunities for children to attend preschool and helps improve kindergarten readiness. PFE partners with Head Start to enrich the classroom learning environment with supplemental curriculum, materials, and professional development as needed. Twenty preschool teachers received intensive coaching for one-to-two years to improve the quality of their classrooms as measured by the Early Childhood Environmental Rating Scale (ECERS), one measure used in the Kentucky Preschool Program Review conducted by the Kentucky Department of Education. All three of the districts PN served received acceptable scores on the ECERS and passed other elements of the Review.

Home visiting

Berea had a Save the Children office before PfE’s first Promise Neighborhood grant that operated a home visiting program for children before preschool, from birth to three. The grant enabled the expansion from six to 11 schools, and the second PN grant will further expand that into seven Knox county schools, enabling PfE to serve 140 families. Save the Children also provides early literacy programs in schools and is now adding other services, like parent-child playgroups for preschool-aged children.¹⁰

Online support for early childhood development

Partners for Education has a grant from the Bezos Foundation for VROOM, a program of brain-building messages that can be delivered in various ways. Parents who download the app receive daily lessons and fun brain development activities they can do at home (or in other places) with their children. PfE works two ways, with local network leaders who ask top management to send messaging, and with child care training and assistance teams to disseminate the information locally, from the ground up. VROOM works well in rural communities, as the information can be shared in meetings, newsletters, and through texts, or lists of tips in local restaurants for families without cell phones.¹¹

Academic Enrichment

With their tiny towns, scattered residents, and scant resources, schools in Eastern Kentucky struggle to provide basic education at a decent level, let alone the enrichment that they know their students need and deserve. A combination of state cuts to education since the 2008 recession that have not been restored and reductions in federal assistance for poor schools has hit those in places like Appalachia especially hard. In recent years, this situation has been compounded by the loss of local revenue from the coal industry, which makes it very difficult for education to serve as the vehicle to move people past a coal economy culture. In a 2014 Lexington Herald-Leader article, John Cheves exposed how these funding differences in Kentucky schools – students in the tiny Appalachian town of Barbour receive just over $8,000 per student, while their counterparts in wealthy Anchorage have almost $20,000 to pay for teacher raises, new textbooks, technology, and arts – leave students in economically distressed areas at a significant disadvantage.¹²

At the same time, schools in this region are even more critical to student access to such options, since community theatre, music, arts classes, and other enrichment opportunities are few or nonexistent. Promise Neighborhood grants have enabled PfE to bring students and schools in these counties a range of enrichment options, with arts playing a central role. And because Berea College is dedicated to uplifting the culture and history of Appalachia, it ensures that art, music, and literature from the region feature prominently in programs, initiatives, murals, and other arts items supported by PN grants.

PN grants also enable PfE to embed academic interventionists in every school in the five counties served, and the highest needs schools may have more than one. In Knox County, both Knox Central and Lynn Camp schools have Full-Service Community Schools site coordinators. Teachers in these counties also receive extra support. Advanced Placement (AP) and pre-AP middle and high school teachers in Clay, Jackson, and Knox Counties receive professional development through the National Math and Science Initiative (NMSI) teacher training program. And the original PN grant supported PfE’s partnership with the Collaborative for Teaching and Learning, a 20-year-old organization that provided professional development to teachers and school and district leaders, provides professional development to teachers of young children in Clay, Jackson, and Owsley counties focused on supporting the development of math and early literacy skills.¹³

Special curriculum options

PfE enabled schools to purchase new curricula like Envision Math and Reading Street. They have built-in interventions to help students who are low-achieving, and they are differentiated, so they help students work on and build up specific skill areas where they are weak.¹⁴ At Big Creek ES, principal Nadine Couch notes that the new PreK-3 reading program adopted in the first PN year did not support older students. So she asked for and obtained parallel reading materials for her fourth, fifth, and sixth graders, along with a summer school program that had high attendance its first year.

To address students’ limited access to age-appropriate books, PfE used PN funding to purchase Kindles for every student at Big Creek elementary along with the MyON reading program. After an internet safety training, students can take the devices home, giving them access to over 10,000 books.

Arts residencies

When PfE received its PN grant, state budget cuts that compounded long-standing resource shortages in high-poverty schools had nearly eliminated arts programming in most Eastern Kentucky elementary schools. Middle and high schools had visual arts and music teachers, typically one each per school, though they often taught other subjects and had other teaching responsibilities that they shared with other schools as well, and communities provided almost no out-of-school arts opportunities.¹⁵ Natalie Gabbard, who had been hired by PfE as the Content Specialist for Arts and Humanities, went out with Judy Sizemore, a teaching artist and arts consultant based in the Promise Neighborhood, to area schools. At Tyner Elementary, where Gabbard had gone as a child, they gradually won over teachers, then parents, and finally principals who saw that children were doing better in core subjects as a result of their enhanced engagement. Employing teaching artists from the region to establish residencies in the schools served multiple purposes: providing income for artists, giving students access to expert instruction in Appalachian art and culture, and helping teachers attain the skills to conduct art activities in their classrooms.¹⁶

So many students have no idea of their cultural heritage or its artistic excellence and need to know about strengths, also the connection to African, African-American, and Native American culture in Appalachia.¹⁷

– Natalie Gabbard, Associate Director, Arts and Humanities, PfE

The residencies at Tyner and McKee Elementary in Jackson County, which now hosts an annual evening with the arts, opened the door to arts programming at several other schools. And three years after Principal Tim Johnson told Gabbard he had no interest, he asked her and Sizemore to help align the school’s reading curriculum with the arts, an enhancement that is still sustained. The school has continued to apply for arts funding on its own and hosts an annual arts night/student showcase. Tyner Assistant Principal Melissa Baker remarks on the impact arts have had on her school. During “culture week,” one parent and all her kids dressed up for different cultures. And for Christmas, now they do Christmas little suitcases and pretend they are going to different countries in classrooms. Last year, the second grade did Mexico, and third grade did France.

Before we had [PN funding], there was not nearly as much art going on. Now it’s just part of our culture. And that exposure to the arts boosts self-esteem for kids who aren’t into other subjects. But it goes beyond that, it changes the whole culture and gets parents involved.¹⁸

Theatre programs

In tiny Owsley County, regional artists Bob Martin and Anne Shelby introduced a program called Homesong that is designed to help Appalachian families and communities “tell their own stories” through theatre.¹⁹ English and other teachers encourage their students to interview family and community members about their stories, which are then woven together by script-writers and turned into a play, which also features original songs written by students and community members. Berea College student Frankie Jo Baldwin, a graduate of Owsley High School, was among the first students to participate and says that the experience still opens up opportunities for her. She describes spending eight-to-ten hours a day running scenes and blocking to prepare. At the beginning, people did not believe in it and didn’t think anyone would come, but it sold out every night and now they even do encore performances.

There’s all this negativity about being in the poorest county in the US. We are trying to push back against all of that. The experience of getting to tell your own story was really powerful for some of these people. We had women who were 75 and girls who were seven. We asked, ‘Do you want a part in this play, so you can tell your own story?’ and they said, ‘no way, I could never do that.’ And now they’re the star of the show. It wasn’t that someone came in and created this. It was all driven by us, community-made and community-led.²⁰

– Frankie-Jo Baldwin, Berea College sophomore and graduate of Owsley County High School

Creative use of technology

The isolated, rural context in which PfE operates has prompted teachers, principals, and others to look to technology for alternative avenues for education and enrichment. The MyOn reading program at Big Creek elementary and other schools is just one example. Even in remote areas, most families have internet access, so the one-time purchase means that after the PN grant expires, every student has extensive access to books for at least three years.²¹ Likewise, VROOM brings early childhood development to parents who could not otherwise access it.

All eighth graders and three-quarters of ninth graders in the Promise Neighborhood counties receive traditional, face-to-face mentoring over Skype for 30 minutes twice a month through a program called Connecting the Dots. Most of the mentors are current college students, many of whom grew up in Kentucky and come from low-income backgrounds.²²

Owsley County High School Principal Charlie Davison and his wife Stacy, Owsley County Schools’ supervisor of instruction, decided in 2017 to invest in three zSpace machines for the school’s tech lab. The machines can be connected to 3D and Virtual Reality goggles and, depending on the software purchased to support them, enable students to engage in such activities as studying a beating heart. “Right now, we have Vived Science, zSpace Studio and zView,” Stacy Davison says, “and our plan is to continue to add software packages and hardware until we have a full lab.”²³

In order to stem summer learning loss, PfE created a summer program with the Collaborative for Teaching and Learning that mails books to middle school students over the summer and hosts online book club meetings. This program, which served 329 students in 2015, reflects the unique needs of students in areas of rural poverty, and the importance of targeting programs that meet them.²⁴

College and career preparation

Geographic isolation and lack of exposure to diverse education and job opportunities make it hard for schools to prepare area high school students for college and make higher education feel like a viable goal. Teachers and principals thus draw on a combination of traditional and unique strategies to create a college-going culture and persuade students and their parents to prioritize it. At Owsley High School, principal Charlie Davidson sometimes is at the school at 5 am to get students on a bus for their job shadowing at the Toyota plant in Georgetown, nearly two hours away close to the Ohio border.

Through its Accelerating Academic Achievement in Appalachian Kentucky (A4KY) program, Partners for Education offers Advanced Placement test preparation, high school academic counseling, and college counseling for families in Clay, Jackson, and Knox counties. A pilot program, Horizons, uses Skype to match high school students with Berea College students who can walk them through their junior and senior years and the application process.²⁵ Specialists also assist students and families with college applications, financial aid and preparing for the ACT. Finally, PfE cultivated a partnership with Somerset Community College through which it built the Synergy program, which gives students an opportunity to enroll and get through a lot of the initial paperwork, with assistance, before they finish their senior year in high school.

Academic specialists and postsecondary specialists who work in the high schools organize college and career trips based on student interest. For example, students with interests in the medical field, forensics, or veterinary medicine went to the University of Tennessee and Lincoln Memorial University, and on one trip they toured the veterinary school at LMU. At UT, they had a question-and-answer session with forensic pathology professors and had an opportunity to view and touch two complete skeletons. They also talked with graduate students.

Family engagement specialists also organized college and career events that included parents. One year, they went to see a play at the University of Kentucky, toured the theater and learned about arts and humanities offerings at the university. Beth Brown says these trips were especially good for parents who hadn’t attended college because it gave them an idea of what their child would be going to. In some instances, the trips also helped students realize they would like, or dislike, a place as big as UK so they might change their mind and apply to a smaller institution, like Morehead.

While these college visits are a key way to increase exposure and reduce students’ and parents’ fears, logistics and finances still pose barriers for many students.

The biggest thing is to emphasize that it’s REALLY possible [to go to college]. Yes, it’s far, and it costs money, but you can do it. They’ve been taught to be practical, so they just push it off the table, so the first step is making them know that it’s a genuine possibility. For kids whose parents are struggling to get food on the table or get enough gas for a visit to a college, it’s hard to get them to look past their fear of crippling debt. I just keep telling them that it’s an investment in your future.²⁶

Finally, because some students in the region enroll in online classes, PfE is able to offer them some support as they begin their college career. For example, in Owsley County they can use the school’s computers, and the PN postsecondary specialist is there to assist them if they run into problems.

Health and Nutrition

The same poverty-related factors that make it hard for parents to access quality child care and preschool limit their children’s regular visit to doctors and dentists. In many schools, subsidized lunches are a major source of students’ food, with families stretched to provide nutritious meals. Mental health is perhaps the biggest concern; on top of the toxic stress of growing up in poverty, especially deep poverty, the opioid epidemic means that children see their aunts, uncles, siblings, and parents high, being arrested and taken to jail, and even overdosing and dying.

Family Resource and Youth Service Centers

Another product of the 1990 Kentucky Education Reform Act, FRYCSs help to support the physical and mental health of all of the region’s students. Berea High School, for example, houses the Berea Family Resource and Youth Services Center, which offers health and education services for families, including expectant parents and crisis counseling, and referrals to community agencies, free of charge for all members of the community who have children. Across the counties served by PfE, Clay County elementary, middle, and high schools house FRYCSs, as do schools in Jackson and Knox Counties, and Owsley County is home to both a Family Resource Center and a Youth Center. In addition, Promise Neighborhood grants have been leveraged in several ways to enable PfE to enhance the well-being of area students and their families.

Dental health

The Kentucky Oral Health Commission awarded grants to all three Early Childhood Councils in Promise Neighborhood counties to provide oral health training for new parents.

Physical health and wellness

The Berea College Promise Neighborhood collaborates with schools and community partners to provide activities such as a run/walk club, summer fitness program, gardening, food preservation, a Jump Start program, and more. In addition to FRYSCs, individual schools may employ innovative programs. At Owsley High School, for example, the school nurse can use a program on her laptop to connect with a doctor remotely to assess and report a student’s vital signs and symptoms, enabling her to receive a diagnosis, a prescription if needed, and if the illness is more serious, a referral to a regional hospital. This benefits students and the school, as it eliminates the need for a student to leave class for an appointment, so they miss fewer school days.

• Clay County Storywalk: Another barrier to learning in Appalachia is the dearth of safe spaces to get exercise, which contributes to poor health. Children in Clay, Jackson, Knox, and Owsley counties live in the ironic situation of being surrounded by natural beauty that is hard, in practice, to access. Roads are windy and can be treacherous and sidewalks are rare, so walking from home to any destination is unsafe, and distances can be many miles. Partners for Education responded to this gap in Clay County by building “community storywalks” at several elementary schools and in the public park. Young children and their parents or caretakers can walk a loop that tells the story, along the way, of Scaredy Squirrel, who is initially scared to go camping, but learns that the real thing, out in the woods, is better than an online experience. At Tyner Elementary, Promise Neighborhood funding helped build a walking track and purchase athletic equipment that the school has only to maintain.

Mental health supports

Partners for Education addresses safety in Promise Neighborhood schools through bystander prevention work, character education, and recovery coaching.

Clay County Middle School is one of several supported by PN grants that have adopted the Green Dot violence prevention program. For students who “are already angry when they come in” due to struggles with poverty and issues at home, or who don’t want to come to school because they do not know if their parent will be home or in jail when they return, Principal Steve Burchfield says that Green Dot has really helped. ²⁷ The Green Dot trainer teaches students who participate in the training how to recognize their peers’ moods by their facial expressions and the words they use and provides them tools to de-escalate situations. Behavior problems and fist fights have gone down substantially. The program also helps to reduce bullying by explaining to victims that children who bully often are dealing with bigger problems outside of school, and by bringing bully and victim together to discuss underlying issues. Owsley County schools also used PN resources to buy a new curriculum, Bullying 101, Coping or Stopping, that teaches children how to be resilient.²⁸

Schools also support their students’ mental and emotional health in other ways. Tyner Elementary assistant principal Melissa Baker says that the school has changed its approach to red ribbon week (which is about drug awareness). In the past, they just had kids wear silly socks and put up anti-drug logos. This year, the family resource director “wanted to do things that matter,” so she brought in guests every day to meet with children in small groups, encouraging them to open up about how drug abuse and addiction was affecting them personally. “Schools have a responsibility to educate kids, to stop them from doing the same negative things their parents did, and take care of their needs to the extent we can. We can’t stop the drug issue, but we can take part in doing that.”²⁹

Finally, art is integrated into health and wellness through dance residencies, safety and wellness programs that discuss substance use awareness and healthy relationship awareness, and murals in school cafeterias that promote healthy food choices.

Parent and Family Engagement

In Appalachia’s tightknit communities, gaining the support of parents and families is especially critical for children’s success. At the same time, long distances between schools and homes, many parents’ limited formal education and discomfort with school administrators, and those parents’ lack of exposure to the possibilities for post-second education, make engaging them in their children’s schools a major challenge. As Rochelle Garrett, director of family partnerships, notes, many parents are like her own – they focus on practical outcomes for their children, so they emphasize getting a job after high school. College is either not on their radar or a distraction from what is.³⁰ In recent years, these barriers have been exacerbated by the increasing number of students being raised not by their parents, but by grandparents and even great-grandparents.³¹ These non-parental caretakers need even more support to support children academically and learn how to engage with schools to do so.

Partners for Education has thus made engaging parents, grandparents, and other “extended family” caretakers a high priority. PfE places family engagement specialists in each county, with the goal of supporting parents early in their children’s lives and building sustainable strong relationships and community leaders who will carry on the work after the PN grants expire.³²

Parents and caregivers need a network of supporting relationships, because when you have those, they have a lot of the same questions, they get that courage to go into the school for parent-teacher conferences, and they know what to ask to help their grandchild to be successful.³³

– Rochelle Garrett, Director of Family Partnerships, Middletown

Family engagement specialist Sue Christian started the Owsley County Parent Task Force “not to do bake sales, but to be educated about Common Core, what goes on in schools, school policy.” She wants parents to be involved in things like wellness committees in schools, and she says it is working. A food bag program almost ended last year because the school said it had to abide by a state law limiting what students could bring on the bus. But a task force parent found that the school handbook did not reflect the law, so he raised the issue with administrators, who decided to let the food bag program continue with parameters. “Some self-educated parents have empowered themselves to sustain a program that was very important to kids that were getting food on weekend. There’s one thing about rules, there’s a whole other thing about being hungry.”³⁴

The county action team also supports grandparents who are raising children, changing its name from “grandparents as parents” to “Adults Raising Others’ Children” to be inclusive. And it works to help parents support their children’s math, which school leaders say poses the biggest challenges across the region. Few parents can provide substantive help, so teachers come to demonstrate strategies that make math more fun and less scary and connect students with folks at school who can help them.

Families and Schools Together

Partners for Education works with FAST in several of its PN communities. The program is designed both to strengthen vulnerable and unstable families and to connect them to schools so that they can be effective partners in their children’s education.³⁵ FAST builds teams of community, school and parent leaders, with many parent “graduates” becoming leaders of subsequent teams.

Smart and Secure Children

A subgrant from the Morehouse University School of Medicine Satcher Health Leadership Institute enables PfE to implement SSC, a zero-to-five program that focuses on successful transitions to kindergarten. Like in FAST, parents from the community become parent leaders, and each recruits five or so families for each team. Trained parent leaders have a curriculum that addresses issues like healthy eating and effective shopping. The ten-week relationship-building program supports a school-connection process, and parent graduates are connected to the parent task force. Sue Christian combined FAST and SSC in order to apply the latter’s curriculum to bolster FAST’s empowerment approach.³⁶ Christian believes that, while there is a wide range of ability and stability across families, all benefit, perhaps most among parents who come in with little belief in their own capacity to be good parents. She recounts how one pair of sessions played out:

We ran two sets [of families] at the same time. One set had more families with “supports” – they were intact and had better participation rates.  That was smoothest. The group with the most issues were families who attended more sporadically. They were harder to retain, and they were much harder to help. These parents were the most isolated as single parents or extended relatives, but they really made connections with each other, so they got a lot out of it. At the end of the program, parents would tell you, “I’m not as big a muck-up as I thought. There are lots of other parents dealing with the same kinds of things I am.”³⁷

The Task Force recognized a gap not only between schools and parents, but between parents and their children. So they initiated a back-to-school-night at Owsley County High School to reduce parent-student tension. Parents get to learn their children’s schedules and meet their teachers at the start of the school year. Like other PfE-supported pilot programs, principals were skeptical. In the first year, however, 107 parents showed up (about a third of the student body), with numbers growing each year, and about two-thirds of students having a parent participate in fall 2017. The first year, PN also helped provide school supplies, which Sue’s team has since picked up. Checking in with schools on supply lists and bringing them to back-to-school night “helps kids show up prepared on the first day. Otherwise, it’s three weeks until their parents next paycheck, and they lose all that time and ground.”³⁸

Christian’s journey to become a family engagement specialist who recruits other parents to FAST and SSC sessions illustrates why engaging parents like her is so critical to PfE’s work and the region’s future.

When I was a Site-Based Decision-Making Parent Council member, I didn’t understand the talk, because I didn’t have as much education as the teachers and administrators. College helped me learn what kind of student I was. I wanted to help educate parents to understand things. Before I went to college and learned to navigate the school system sometimes I sat at meetings and felt so stupid, and I was disadvantaged for it.³⁹

Financial literacy

The combination of low family income, lack of experience with banks and saving, and predatory practices in the financial industry make it important to educate parents about how to spend and save wisely. PfE installed Virtual Teller Machines and partners with a local credit union to teach financial literacy. They also work in high schools to teach students about opening savings and checking accounts, based on evidence that kids who have savings account are more likely to graduate from college.⁴⁰

Creative family engagement activities/initiatives

Schools have also developed unique activities to bring parents and entire families into schools in the evenings and during the summer. One Jackson County elementary school has created an arts night to showcase students’ artwork that has become one of the county’s most popular events in recent years, with the principal forced to go to overflow parking. At college and career nights, parents can learn about and even get help filling out financial aid forms. Others include family literacy night and All Pro Dads, a monthly meeting that brings fathers into schools with their children to read a book, as well as summer programs like Grilling with Dads or community-wide canning programs.

Comprehensive Services for the Extended Service Region

Within PfE’s 31-county service region, 11 counties are the organization’s area of focus. These counties include the Promise Zone, the two counties from the original Promise Neighborhood that are not in the Zone (Jackson and Owsley), and PfE’s home county, Madison. While students who live in these counties receive intensive support from Partners for Education, some of the same services are also available throughout the PfE extended service region. Partners for Education Associate E.D. Penny Jordan notes that

We are doing high-quality college access and success programming in these counties. These intensive programs follow cohorts of students from middle school through their first year of college to support their success.

Policies and Practices

Partners for Education’s work to improve education in Eastern Kentucky has been advanced both by practices it cultivated and by state- and federal-level policies. This section explores these and the policy implications of the community’s integrated student supports efforts.

PfE, PN work staffed by locals

Appalachia’s self-contained nature means that people who grew up there and made it through college want to return to the area if they can find jobs to support them, and few people from outside move in. Partners for Education thus is able to recruit homegrown success stories to serve as academic and early childhood, academic, and family engagement specialists who understand parents’ lack of confidence in trying to talk to teachers – many were themselves unwilling to engage with schools until they went back to school and felt sufficiently educated to do so. Most teachers and principals in Clay, Jackson, and Owsley County schools graduated from those same schools; they know first-hand the challenges their students face to travel the same path. Some recount having been mediocre students and someone outside their immediate families pushing them to consider higher education as a path out of the poverty they had grown up in.

I talk to every kid in this building once a year about their options and choices. I talk about my brother, who is in jail for selling drugs and has been in and out of jail his whole life. I am open about marrying my second wife when she was seven months pregnant and how hard it was to try to take care of a young wife and a new baby pumping gas. I hadn’t even planned to go to college, but my brother’s girlfriend was going, so I heard about it and was able to use the GI Bill. I tell [my students] that I faced many of the same barriers they do. These kids see all the issues and barriers they can’t get past, because they don’t know what’s out there. It’s our job to show them.⁴¹

– Clay County Middle School Principal Steve Burchfield

Across the board, PfE staff voice a powerful feeling that their success in having gotten up and out calls them to do “whatever it takes to get these kids a better life. They need to see that there’s a bigger, better world out there that they deserve and can reach. We can’t let the ‘normal’ school schedule hold us back. If we have to get our students on a bus at 5 am [to do job shadowing at the Toyota plant], and they return at midnight, we’re there.”⁴² When a principal shares his brother’s struggles with drug addiction and jail, students are much more comfortable opening up about their own families and turning to school leaders to help them avoid the same problems.

The homegrown focus also enhances the sustainability of PN-supported programs after the funding expires. The arts residencies, for example, continue to be funded in several schools through the Kentucky Arts Council. Tyner Elementary also has sustained the arts-reading curriculum alignment it designed under the PN grant and continues to host “culture week.” Melissa Baker, assistant principal at Tyner, says that since PfE used PN grants to help incorporate the use of data by embedding three academic specialists, the school requires all teachers to keep spreadsheets with every student’s data, which are reviewed at least three times annually and used to target academic interventions to keep them on track.⁴³ Wellness equipment like the walking track and athletic supplies at Tyner and the Community Storywalk at Big Creek have only to be maintained by schools and will continue to serve communities for decades to go. And while PN no longer supports the task force in Owsley, the parent task force established relationships with local non-profits that provide space or snacks as needed.⁴⁴

Finally, Berea College, which is home to Partners for Education, also philosophically anchors this work. It promotes higher education and makes it attainable in a region starved of it and encourages its graduates to return to their communities and “pay it forward,” with the many former students featured in this study evidence of its success. Given urgent demands to make higher education more accessible, affordable, and relevant to a much greater and more diverse swath of US graduates than ever before, perhaps Berea should be viewed not as an unattainable anomaly, but as a pilot case to be studied, adapted and/or replicated in other contexts.

Use of technology to tailor ISS to rural context

While they face many of the same poverty-related challenges as their urban counterparts, rural schools and communities have added issues and must devise unique strategies. With their deep understanding of Appalachian culture and context, Berea College and Partners for Education are well positioned to pilot such approaches. For example, PfE wanted to sustain gains it had made among early childhood teachers after funding for coaches ran out, so they purchased robotic cameras that teachers can use to videotape and share their lessons and playtime with students. This not only enabled peer-to-peer advice and supervisor feedback, but made it possible for supervisors who often wear multiple education hats and travel long distances between schools to provide helpful guidance. PfE is also piloting a new program, Horizon Fellows, in which high school students are paired with PfE graduates/college students. Last year, Frankie-Joe Baldwin worked with 23 juniors to mentor them via text. This year, she is helping them to prepare for college. “They don’t have anyone in their community to ask questions, so I support them, ask questions, and nudge them. Ultimately, if I didn’t have those people, I wouldn’t be at Berea.”⁴⁵

State Pre-K

Kentucky was an early investor in pre-kindergarten and has grown its program to serve 26 percent of four-year-olds and nine percent of three-year-olds as of 2016. The program is of high quality and, in recent years, the state has built in a quality rating system for early childhood education providers as well as incentives for private-partnerships to provide quality, full-day care for more children.⁴⁶ In response to concerns about poor preparation and support of early childhood educators, in 2015 the state began to fund specialists who target improvements to the teacher-student relationships and classroom environment, which are known to be critical to improving key outcomes like kindergarten readiness.⁴⁷ Still, lack of slots in rural counties means that PfE and its partners, like Save the Children, must supplement state programs to ensure that more vulnerable children arrive at kindergarten ready to learn.

Kentucky has also benefitted from its Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge Fund grant, which spurred the state to require all early childhood settings receiving public dollars to be rated for quality. The goal is to have 100 percent of early childhood providers enrolled, and PfE has done well in its counties, with every program in the PN counties enrolled and working with consultants to improve their rating levels.⁴⁸ The state has developed a strong system of training and technical assistance, with quality and PD coaches visiting child care centers regularly and money available for incentives to boost quality.

Family Resource and Youth Service Centers

Another result of the 1990 education reform act is the establishment of Family Resource and Youth Service Centers, or so-called “FRYSCs,” in counties across the state. Roughly half of Kentucky students qualify for free or reduced-priced school meals, and any school in which 20 percent or more are eligible can compete for funds for a FRYSC. In 2008, changes to the law made changes to the core services offered at the two types of centers – Family Resource Centers that serve children from birth through elementary schools, and Youth Resource Centers that serve middle and high school-aged children. In the Promise Neighborhood counties served by Partners for Education, FRYSCs help support children’s and parents’ health and mental health; work to educate and empower parents; and improve overall family engagement in children’s education.

Time-limited federal grants enable this work AND present challenges to sustainability

While Promise Neighborhood (and other federal grants) enable organizations like Partners for Education to enact and expand enrichment and other programs that would otherwise not be possible, their time-limited nature also presents major challenges to recipient communities. As described above, PfE has been able to sustain many of the initiatives it put in place and the gains attained due to them. But in other, important cases, schools and students have lost ground when grants expired and the programs they supported could not be sustained. At Big Creek Elementary School in Oneida, for example, Promise Neighborhood funding enabled 40 students who live far from the school to participate in enriching afterschool activities in 2015 and 2016. But in 2017, they lost the transportation that made it possible, along with parent involvement and arts activities that had benefitted students and the school as a whole.⁴⁹ Loss of PN funding eliminated several effective strategies and reduced children’s exposure to enrichment experiences, which was compounded by across-the-board state funding cuts and by the holding up of Title I funds.

PfE Executive Dreama Gentry sees both major benefits in such grants and inherent flaws that policy changes might alleviate. “While we are always thankful for the resources provided by programs like Promise Neighborhoods, we also know that the time limits mean grant funding will often run out before the underlying problems have been solved,” said Gentry. While she believes that longer term investments are needed, she also says that with each project her team has become more efficient and effective. “We really understand much better what works, and the people of Knox County will directly benefit from what we learned in our original Promise Neighborhood. Our ability to engage communities and use data is much greater today than when we started.”

Accountability, evaluation, continuous improvement embedded/built in

While they offer grantees substantial flexibility in designing and implementing strategies to improve student and community health and education, Promise Neighborhoods grants come with strict requirements around data and accountability. PfE has leveraged these requirements to build a data collection and analysis system that drives continuous improvement. The enhanced system is supported by an expanded data team, which now includes data analysts and data managers to oversee the comprehensive data management plan’s implementation, as well as ensure there are ample staff and/or contractors to manage PfE’s data collection, case management, and longitudinal data systems.

Sherry Scott, a PfE director of programs, says that the data team not only ensures compliance and quality control, but also provides recommendations and support for system improvement, like their recent implementation of a software system that provides survey creation and scanning to aid in the data collection process.

Our data system follows students over time tracking individual student demographic data, types of services received and dosage of the intervention.  The system allows staff and partners to explore the relationship between various variables and educational gain along with other outcomes.  The data system gives us not only the ability to collect and monitor the data, but also provides the necessary elements to analyze the data allowing for real time program improvements.  Supervisors review all service data on a monthly basis, meeting with partners and staff to discuss program improvements and expansions.  Staff meet monthly as a program team to discuss summary data reports and utilizing the principles of results-based accountability make the necessary program improvements.  We convene cross-sector community working groups for each of the results quarterly to review data specific to the population level result and make the necessary adjustments to strategy. We utilize a local evaluator to develop and implement an evaluation strategy that is both comprehensive and rigorous in determining the effectiveness of our program.⁵⁰

Other state policies have been less helpful for PfE’s work and stand in the way of its potential expansion to other Kentucky communities.

School funding inequities, cuts

For over a decade after the enactment of the Kentucky Education Reform Act, which included requirements for higher and more equitable per-pupil funding, Kentucky saw its schools gradually climb from among the nation’s lowest-ranked. By the early 2000s, the redistribution of funds had narrowed the gap between the poorest and richest communities, such that per-pupil revenue in Appalachian Barbourville rose to 62 percent of that in wealthy suburban Anchorage. In 2008, however, the national recession drove state cuts to education funding that reduced equity and hit high-poverty districts especially hard. As education journalist John Cheves reports, “Kentucky froze its $2.9 billion-a-year SEEK program, the state’s primary funding source for schools. That was tantamount to a reduction as enrollment and costs such as fuel and health insurance kept rising. The state axed most everything else, including its assistance for textbook purchases, teacher training and technology upgrades.” Federal “sequestration” cuts exacted further pain to the same poor schools; in 2013, high-poverty Kentucky schools lost tens of millions of dollars in support.⁵¹ All of this has been compounded by the loss of local revenue as coal mines have closed down over the past decade.

School and community leaders in Promise Neighborhood communities relate the consequences of these cuts. Big Creek Elementary School principal Nadine Couch really wishes they had music. An artist who used to come had worked for several weeks in the afterschool program and did “amazing work” with some of the special needs students, tying music to math. “One kid on the autism spectrum, who didn’t talk otherwise, picked up an instrument and said ‘my dad’s gonna buy me a guitar.’” In Owsley County, Sue Christian describes the challenges of struggling with very few resources as schools lose students. In the high school (which serves students in grades 7th through 12th grade), getting down to just 300 students means the 16 teachers must be focused on core subjects, so there are very few options for electives. First they cut art, then P.E., since there was no regular P.E. teacher. They try to do “brain breaks” in the class, but they were hard for teachers to lead effectively. And the school day has gotten shorter than what it used to be.⁵²

These cuts also further reduce already insufficient support for mental health. Elementary school Nadine Crouch describes this as perhaps her most pressing issue. The only services her students can draw on is district-wide comp care, which provides in-school and family counseling as well as a few afterschool programs. Monday mornings are rife with meltdowns among students who have spent a toxic weekend with mom or dad, as are Fridays, when students who do not want to go visit are facing that weekend. In the past three years, Big Creek counselors are dealing with major increases in self-harm, like cutting, and even suicide threats. Last year, a girl whose father had been Nadine’s student when she was a teacher, was sentenced to ten years in prison, along with her aunt, who was an accomplice to the murder.

Funding

In fiscal year 2018, Partners for Education will leverage $39 million to serve 41,000 young people and their families across 31 rural Appalachian Kentucky counties. Of these funds, roughly one third, or approximately $13.4 million, are used in Promise Neighborhoods counties.

The vast majority of that funding (96 percent) is public, from federal government grants, and most of these are from the Department of Education, followed by the Corporation for National and Community Service (4 percent). However, several PfE programs also have a cost-sharing component, where state and local sources may be used for matching purposes.

As noted above, PfE also receives a small amount of private funds from the Kellogg Foundation to support two Readiness Buses for early childhood learning and Bezos Foundation funding for VROOM.

Outcomes

It is difficult for initiatives that provide comprehensive/integrated student supports to disentangle the impacts of the various programs/components and thus to understand how given inputs are linked to specific outcomes. But PfE has worked hard to build in a rigorous system of continuous monitoring and improvement, and it has both anecdotal and data-based evidence of positive impacts it has had on students and families in the counties it serves.

Supports for Students and Schools

• Since 2012, 4,009 elementary, middle and high school students in Promise Neighborhood counties have received one-on-one tutoring.
• Over 5,000 students participated in arts programs in 2013 through Promise Neighborhood initiatives that provide arts training to educators and bring arts programming to schools.
• A4KY serves 4,159 6th- to 12th-graders each year, and has provided training and professional development to over 130 teachers since 2012.

Attendance/engagement

• The Green Dot program encourages student participation and engagement: Every year, Clay County Middle School selects a diverse variety of 60 students to go through the training. But the principals notes that, “when the director was here in the cafeteria [to talk about Green Dot], every kid had a chance to participate, at least in a small part. The strategy is effective because it shows kids there are other options.” Green Dot is a research-based program developed by the University of Kentucky.⁵³
• Arts programs also engage struggling and disengaged students. Partners for Education staff often hear about students whose stories “don’t make it into the quantitative data,” but for whom the arts resonate. In one school, where traditional Appalachian arts are emphasized as part of place-based work, and the basket maker was doing basket-weaving instruction, the student who was the “problem” kid finished first and went on to help other students. Other students who had never before spoken in class became engaged when they got to read a monologue that connected to their experiences, or an interview with a family member.
• At McKee Elementary School’s annual arts night, the second hour was a school-wide production of the Lion King, with every student having a role and a costume. Over a thousand people came to the event, in a community with fewer than 1,000 residents.
• Internal analysis found that 61.3% of Clay, Jackson and Owsley County High School 2013-2018 graduates participated in a college or technical school visit. These visits help students visualize their post-secondary futures.⁵⁴

Parent empowerment/community/other outcomes

• At least 60% of Owsley County parent task force members have participated in the FAST program, so they went from barely or not engaged to engaged in a beneficial way, and internal data show growing partnerships between parents and schools.⁵⁵ One parent engagement specialist thinks schools may not realize that they do better when parents know how to navigate the school system, who to talk to, and have a channel to divert their anger from the school to a parent group discussion. But schools benefit from parents who care more about how their children are doing and what’s going on in schools. Also, attendance and behavior both tend to improve when kids are in FAST.
• The Owsley Task Force also helps schools in other ways. During College Application Week, it hosted a College 411 night for parents, where they could talk about financial aid and get help filling out the FAFSA, which 23 percent of students did on the spot. Roughly 60 percent of Task Force parents are familiar with Individual Education Plans (IEPs), so they are able to train other parents on how to negotiate for them for their children, a valuable tool in helping to navigate a complex school-based bureaucratic process.
• The artist residencies have helped PfE build the capacity of local artists to sustain their work. As one example, Natalie Gabbard recalls putting out notices in local papers in three counties asking artists to come to schools and 40 came, many of them continuing to work in schools. Several of them have since successfully applied to the Kentucky Arts Council for continued funding.
• Frankie-Jo Baldwin says that her participation in Homesong enabled her to work with famed Appalachian children’s author Ann Shelby and ultimately got her the job she now has at Berea.
• Big Creek Elementary School principal Nadine Couch believes that her work with PfE to engage and empower children and their parents makes a big and lasting difference, even if the changes sometimes seem small and may be difficult to detect.

You have to take the attitude that every kid may not get to where you want ideally, but growth in any area is a good thing. We focus on continuous progress monitoring to track it. There are so many kids that are pretty much raising themselves. For the majority of kids [in our school], their providers are not parents. One family here is a grandmother raising 5 kids fourth grade and under, and she is doing a wonderful job. She comes to every event, and the kids are all successful. These are the caretakers we have to support, they make it possible for our students to have a better future.

– Nadine Couch, principal, Big Creek Elementary School, Oneida, KY⁵⁶

Academic improvement

• Kindergarten Readiness: Professional development for preschool teachers provided by PfE has had strong, sustained impacts on them and their young students.
  • PfE-sponsored opportunities enabled five teachers to complete their Child Development Associate credentials, and after working with coaches, all preschool teachers in the Promise Neighborhood region improved their Early Childhood Environmental Rating Scale (ECERS) rating.⁵⁷
  • Between 2012 and 2016, seven early learning centers in PfE’s primary service region earned a STARS rating of three or four, signifying that they are high-quality learning environments.
  • In the years following the implementation of early childhood coaches to boost classroom enrichment and teacher-student relationships, kindergarten readiness among students in the pre-k program rose from 16.3 percent in 2012 to 35.5 percent in 2016-17.⁵
  • School improvement: Several schools in the three-county PN area have moved from the state’s watch list for struggling schools to the “distinguished” category. Tyner made the distinguished list two years in a row, and Assistant Principal Melissa Baker notes that student test scores improved even more in the third year, so the school would have been labeled successful had the state not changed its system.⁵⁹ Principals credit the combination of PfE-sponsored academic specialists, wraparound support for students, and arts enrichment for the improvements.

  

  • Increases in state test scores include an increase in math proficiency from 27.1% in 2012 to 39.9% in 2016 and English/Language Arts proficiency increasing from 37.1% in 2012 to 49.5% in 2016. Those two measures come from the state test.⁶⁰
  • Family engagement boosts college enrollment: Across three high school graduating cohorts, the college enrollment rate is at 51%. In those same cohorts, among students who received 5 or more hours of family engagement services, the college enrollment rate is 71%.⁶¹

  Contact:

  Dreama Gentry, [email protected], 859.985.3622, or visit www.berea.edu/pfe

  Endnotes

  1. Elaine Weiss conversation with Dreama Gentry, Dec. 7, 2017.

  2. https://datausa.io/profile/geo/owsley-county-ky/. These contrast starkly with a state poverty rate that is also above the national average, at 18.5%, and 25.6% among children. https://talkpoverty.org/state-year-report/kentucky-2016-report/

  3. U.S. Department of Commerce, Census Bureau, 2000 Census of Population and Housing, Demographic Profile, Table 2. https://www.arc.gov/publications/DevelopmentandProgressofAHENetwork.asp. Kentucky state data indicate that, across the 55 Appalachian Kentucky counties, over 92 percent of students were graduating from high school in 2015-16. As is true of many state graduation statistics, these seem inflated and unreliable.

  4. While Berea provides tuition promise scholarships and requires student service in lieu of payment, students do accrue some debt from housing, books, and travel for those who study abroad.

  5. The work in Knox began in January 2017. As of January 2018, PfE is also serving a fifth county, Perry, through its PN grant.

  6. The 2016 Pre-K Yearbook by the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) reports that Kentucky ranks 21st for access among 4-year-olds but 9th for 3-year-olds, who are served by many fewer states. It also ranks 9th for overall per-student spending and has met 9 of NIEER’s 10 quality benchmarks. http://nieer.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Kentucky_YB16.pdf.

  7. Elaine Weiss interview with Tennant Kirk. Dec. 6, 2017.

  8. Elaine Weiss interview with Tennant Kirk. Dec. 6, 2017.

  9. Elaine Weiss interview with Nadine Couch. Dec. 7, 2017.

  10. Tennant Kirk points out that Save the Children, a British non-profit, had its first US location in Harlan, Kentucky.

  11. Elaine Weiss interview with Sue Christian. Dec. 8, 2017.

  12. John Cheves, “Tale of two Kentucky schools: Barbourville gets $8,362 per student; Anchorage gets $19,927.” Lexington Herald-Dealer. January 4, 2014. http://www.kentucky.com/news/politics-government/article44465274.html

  13. While this grant was completed in December 2017, and the professional development no longer available, PfE is seeking new funds to sustain the work.

  14. Elaine Weiss interview with Melissa Baker. Dec. 7, 2017.

  15. Elaine Weiss interview with Natalie Gabbard, PfE Associate Director for Arts and Humanities. Dec. 7, 2017.

  16. When Natalie Gabbard came to PfE, Kentucky had just rolled out new standards requiring schools to report what they are doing in arts and humanities (and writing, practical living, others).  Together, these constitute 20% of the school’s accountability score, which gave schools an incentive to bring in artist residents, invest in arts programs.

  17. Elaine Weiss interview with Natalie Gabbard. Dec. 7, 2017.

  18. Elaine Weiss interview with Melissa Baker. Dec. 7, 2017.

  19. “These artists worked closely with the Owsley County Action Team (backbone support for this project) and Owsley County Schools. PfE provided funding for the artist compensation.” Elaine Weiss correspondence with Natalie Gabbard, Jan. 5, 2018.

  20. Elaine Weiss interview with Frankie-Jo Baldwin. Dec. 6, 2017.

  21. Elaine Weiss interview with Nadine Couch. Dec. 7, 2017.

  22. http://www.preventionworksct.org/file_download/inline/a39ff352-f590-4fea-8174-2bf53d852738

  23. Elaine Weiss correspondence with Stacy Davidson. February 2018.

  24. http://www.owsley.kyschools.us/cms/lib6/KY01001255/Centricity/Domain/1/ Berea%20College%20Promise%20Neighborhood%20Summer%20Reading%20Results%20Owsley.pdf

  25. Elaine Weiss interview with Frankie-Joe Baldwin. Dec. 6, 2017.

  26. Elaine Weiss interview with Frankie-Joe Baldwin. Dec. 6, 2017.

  27. Elaine Weiss interview with Steve Burchfield. Dec. 7, 2017.

  28. Elaine Weiss interview with Sue Christian. Dec. 8, 2017.

  29. Elaine Weiss interview with Melissa Baker. Dec. 7, 2017.

  30. Elaine Weiss interview with Rochelle Garrett. Dec. 6, 2017.

  31. Owsley County elementary school Nadine Couch noted that the growing share of grandparents responsible for raising the students in her school has shifted in the past few years to include more than a few great-grandparents. One family she mentioned involved a single grandmother raising five children ages 9 and under.

  32. Beth Brown notes that “We had one per county in the original PN, except for a short time when we had two in Clay.” Elaine Weiss correspondence with Beth Brown, Jan. 5, 2018.

  33. Elaine Weiss interview with Rochelle Garrett. Dec. 6, 2017.

  34. Elaine Weiss interview with Sue Christian. Dec. 8, 2017.

  35. The organization describes itself as “an internationally acclaimed parent engagement program that helps children thrive by building strong relationships at home.” https://www.familiesandschools.org/

  36. FAST is very structured, but they merged these two programs to run them together, and SSC focused on kids 0-5. SSC curriculum provides structure lacking from FAST to apply to parent group time, very productive b/c it focuses on positive parenting, decreasing toxic stress. Elaine Weiss interview with Sue Christian. Dec. 8, 2017.

  37. Elaine Weiss interview with Sue Christian. Dec. 8, 2017.

  38. Elaine Weiss interview with Sue Christian. Dec. 8, 2017.

  39. Elaine Weiss interview with Sue Christian. Dec. 8, 2017.

  40. Elaine Weiss interview with Rochelle Garrett. Dec. 6, 2017.

  41. Elaine Weiss interview with Principal Steve Burchfield. Dec. 7, 2017.

  42. Elaine Weiss interview with Owsley County High School principal Charlie Davison. Dec. 7, 2017.

  43. Elaine Weiss interview with Melissa Baker. Dec. 7, 2017.

  44. Elaine Weiss interview with Sue Christian. Dec. 8, 2017.

  45. Elaine Weiss interview with Frankie-Jo Baldwin. Dec. 6, 2017.

  46. http://nieer.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Kentucky_YB16.pdf.

  47. Elaine Weiss interview with Tennant Kirk, Dec. 6, 2017.

  48. Elaine Weiss interview with Tennant Kirk. Dec. 6, 2017.

  49. Elaine Weiss interview with Nadine Crouch. Dec. 7, 2017.

  50. Elaine Weiss correspondence with Sherry Scott. March 2018.

  51. John Cheves, “Tale of two Kentucky schools: Barbourville gets $8,362 per student; Anchorage gets $19,927.” Lexington Herald-Dealer. January 4, 2014. http://www.kentucky.com/news/politics-government/article44465274.html

  52. Elaine Weiss visit to schools, Dec. 2017.

  53. Elaine Weiss interview with Steve Burchfield. Dec. 7, 2017.

  54. Elaine Weiss correspondence with Rebecca Tucker. April 2018.

  55. Elaine Weiss interview with Sue Christian. Dec. 8, 2017.

  56. Elaine Weiss interview with Nadine Couch. Dec. 7, 2017.

  57. Elaine Weiss correspondence with Beth Brown, April 2018.

  58. Elaine Weiss interview with Tennant Kirk, internal data collected by Partners for Education as part of monitoring for Promise Neighborhood grant reporting.

  59. Elaine Weiss interview with Melissa Baker. Dec. 7, 2017.

  60. Internal data collected by Partners for Education as part of monitoring for Promise Neighborhood grant reporting.

  61. Elaine Weiss correspondence with Rebecca Tucker, April 2018.

Approximately 53 percent of the 23,500 students served in Vancouver Public Schools (VPS) qualified for federally subsidized school meals in 2015, up from 39 percent less than a decade prior.1 Family poverty and in-out migration present significant challenges throughout the district, especially at schools in the inner-urban areas, where more than 80 percent of students, on average, are eligible for free or reduced-price meals. Decades of experience and research show that the factors associated with growing up in poverty, such as unmet basic needs, family mobility, inadequate medical and dental care, mental health issues, drug and alcohol abuse, crime, violence, and gang involvement impede student learning. Family engagement in schools also suffers and, as a result, these schools often struggle to ensure that teachers can do their jobs effectively, and that all students can fulfill their potential.

Response

In 2008, as an outgrowth of the district’s strategic planning process,2 VPS developed a proactive, community-schools approach to turning around poverty-impacted sites: Family-Community Resource Centers (FCRCs). That strategy has proved to build school assets, strengthen neighborhoods, and increase student success. Accordingly, when VPS updated its strategic plan in 2014, it established the goal of providing FCRC services at all of the district’s 35 elementary, middle, and high schools by 2020, based on each school’s needs and depending on available resources.

Strategy for Change

Family-Community Resource Centers (FCRCs) alleviate barriers to student success by leveraging a range of community assets and aligning them with school resources and systems.

Staff

Supporting the FCRCs and the system are six central-office staff members (three with responsibilities focused solely on the FCRCs) and one coordinator at each of the 16 participating schools (11 elementary schools, two middle schools, two high schools, and the Fruit Valley Community Learning Center).3 In addition, the district has purchased and equipped a commercial vehicle as a mobile FCRC to serve children and families at non-FCRC schools and in underserved areas of the community. And in response to the dramatic increase in children experiencing food and housing insecurity, two family engagement coordinators provide district-wide support to address basic needs and enhance parent involvement at schools experiencing an influx of low-income students. Other staff in the district work in partnership with FCRCs to address these specific barriers:

• Homelessness. One full-time homeless liaison coordinates transportation for 800 students who are homeless or in transition and works closely with FCRCs to meet basic needs.
• Chronic absenteeism, direct service. Two full-time student advocates conduct home visits and provides outreach to address chronic absenteeism—defined as missing 10 percent or more of instructional days in kindergarten and first grade. The purpose of this outreach is to communicate with families about attendance policies, identify barriers to regular school attendance, and offer connections to resources. In-school attendance incentive programs that recognize consistent and improved attendance complement these efforts.
• Chronic absenteeism, system support. One full-time AmeriCorps VISTA member joined the team in spring 2015 to help initiate a collaborative project to increase consistent school attendance. The three-year project will develop systems to support the integration of attendance awareness and strength-based interventions in partnership with the Vancouver Housing Authority and the National Alliance on Mental Illness in Southwest Washington. In tandem with this effort, a part-time AmeriCorps member assigned by Clark County Public Health will provide both in-school and out-of-school time soccer and basketball opportunities for students who are enrolled in an attendance awareness strategy group.

Organization/Coalition

To fulfill the mission of ensuring that all student needs are met, and that disadvantaged students, in particular, are well prepared for school and have the support they need to succeed, district leaders collaborate with multiple partners.

• Public/community sector partners. Partnerships are central to the Family-Community Resource Center system. Public, private, faith-based, and nonprofit partners work in concert to sustain and deliver high-quality services that contribute to the overall health of the community, and FCRCs have become a place where this work and commitment cross sectors. Public and community partners and service providers include:
  • Education service providers: faith-based organizations, Educational Opportunities for Children and Families, Early Head Start and Head Start, the Early Childhood Education and Assistance Program (Washington state’s comprehensive preschool program), and Educational Service District 112.
  • Health and recreation support: Healthy Living Collaborative of Southwest Washington, YMCA, the Boys and Girls Clubs of Southwest Washington, the Free Clinic of SW Washington, Dream Team Dental, Southwest Washington Behavioral Health, Children’s Center, and six local mental health care agencies.
  • Family, housing, and workforce support: Vancouver Housing Authority, Council for the Homeless, Southwest Washington Workforce Development Council, Partners in Careers, and Share.
  • Public and higher education institutions: state colleges and universities and various city, county, and state agencies.
• Private-sector partners. The private sector also has played a major role in helping to scale up and sustain Family-Community Resource Centers and FCRC-related services to schools. These partners have made it possible to provide children with basic needs assistance and to alleviate barriers to parent involvement in school-based activities and student conferences.
  • Local and national foundations that support this work include the Foundation for Vancouver Public Schools, Community Foundation for Southwest Washington, Fruit Valley Foundation, Hough Foundation, Hudson’s Bay Foundation, Daimler Chrysler, KMR Group Foundation, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
  • Local and national businesses that enhance FCRC efforts in a variety of ways include Beaches Restaurant, Umpqua Bank, Target, Waste Connections, Neil Jones Food Companies, Vancouvers Women’s Foundation, Humanity First, Altrusa International, Wal-Mart, Payless ShoeSource, Costco, and Columbia Credit Union.

Comprehensive Services

In order to help children and families build capacity, site coordinators at each FCRC connect them with resources for a range of basic needs, from food and shelter to child care and counseling services. Site coordinators also help organize many of the school-based services described here, which are tailored to schools’ unique needs.

• Early childhood education offerings are many and cover literacy and social learning.
  • Federally and state-funded preschool/early learning programs are offered in or adjacent to seven FCRC schools in partnership with Educational Opportunities for Children and Families and Educational Service District 112.
  • 1-2-3 Grow and Learn is a weekly 90-minute literacy-rich program for young children and their parent/caregiver. The curriculum promotes early social and education experiences that provide a foundation for school readiness. This program is offered weekly at twelve elementary schools in high-poverty neighborhoods, and approximately 100 children participate with their caregivers. Offered at no cost to the family, 1-2-3 Grow and Learn is a service purchased from Educational Service District 112.
  • King Preschool is a part-day early-learning program for up to 28 four-year-old children residing within the boundaries of Title 1–designated elementary schools. The district staffs and manages this program.
  • Literacy Packets are distributed to more than 6,000 early learners—children birth to age 5—each year. The early childhood preschool packets, which are developed and distributed by VPS, offer fun activities and lessons that families can do at home to support their children’s development.
  • Full-day kindergarten and Kindergarten Jump Start, a school readiness program, are offered at all 21 elementary school sites. Funded through district and private contributions, Kindergarten Jump Start gives incoming kindergarteners extra time to transition to the activities and rigor of school prior to the start of school each year. In summer 2014, nearly 1,000 of more than 1,500 age-eligible kindergarteners in VPS attended Kindergarten Jump Start.
  • A new early learning center opened August 2015 in the Hough neighborhood of Vancouver. Administered by Educational Service District 112, which received a $1.1 million grant from the Department of Early Learning, the center can serve up to 140 children enrolled in the Early Childhood Education and Assistance Program. VPS provides hot meals and playground space at the adjacent Hough Elementary School. The Hough Foundation supports both the school and the early childhood center.
  • Child and after-school care is offered on-site at five schools. Three schools share a campus with Boys and Girls Clubs of Southwest Washington, which offer homework help and enrichment activities and keep children safe during out-of-school time.

• Afterschool/summer programs provided by YMCA, Boys and Girls Clubs, and Boy/Girl Scouts include organized sports, math and book clubs, homework club, and many others. Crafts, theatre, choir, robotics, and science are among the options provided at FCRC schools.

• Middle and high school enrichment options include:
  • A set of programs to help students succeed in school and be college ready: Freshman Academy, designed to help freshman students make an easier and more successful transition from middle school into high school by developing the social, academic, and organizational skills necessary for academic success; GearUp, a grant-funded program that follows the entire 9th grade class at Fort Vancouver and Hudson’s Bay high schools through graduation in 2017; AVID, or Advancement via Individual Determination, a college readiness program that equips students with the necessary tools and skills to matriculate through a four-year university program; and College Compass Club, a middle school after-school college-prep program that offers a positive, fun, and encouraging environment where students can grow academically and socially.
  • Other targeted supports: FCRCs also offer Homework Help, groups that offer students a snack and drop-in homework help; DREAMers of Fort Vancouver High School, which supports immigrant youth who face inequalities and other obstacles; coordinated community involvement and volunteer opportunities; and GRADS Teen Parent program, which helps students who are parents remain in school and graduate while developing effective parenting skills.
• Parent supports include:
  • Workshops to support parenting (e.g., Love and Logic), parenting groups (e.g., Padres en Alerta, Conversation Circles, Café con la Directora), and courses such as “Kindergarten Concepts” and “First Grade Concepts” to help parents assist teachers in helping children learn.
  • Other programs empower parents and enhance their skills, including equity (e.g., Finding Your Voice), job preparation and searches, adult education classes (e.g., GED prep classes and English as a second language classes), housing assistance (e.g., Rent Well), computer and language classes, a parent lending library, and a parent leadership advisory group that informs needs and guides program interests.
• Support for families includes help with food, clothing, shelter, employment, transportation, medical and dental care, childcare, and counseling services. Programs such as Share Friday backpacks, free dental clinics, food and clothing closets, and others, vary by school.
  • With approximately $3.5 million in assets, the Foundation for Vancouver Public Schools supports all FCRCs by providing checkbooks for principals and FCRC coordinators.4 At the FCRC sites and throughout the district, foundation resources cover basic needs including clothes, shoes and personal care items; grocery cards; school supplies; bus passes; emergent health needs such as eyeglasses, medications, dental and health care; and emergency rent assistance and utilities when other resources are not available.
  • The foundation also supports 500 volunteer-mentoring programs for elementary students, the Kindergarten JumpStart program, the 1-2-3 Grow and Learn early childhood education program, and enrichment opportunities at schools district-wide.
• Community engagement.
  • Morning events, such as “muffins with moms” and “donuts with dads,” provide information and activities in support of the curriculum. Coffees with principals enhance trust and dialogue. Daytime opportunities bring community members into schools to participate in activities with students, and evening events include preschool family nights, movie nights, and family literacy and math nights.
  • Some schools host neighborhood association meetings, and a Parent Leadership Advisory Group represents the 13 Family-Community Resource Centers.
  • A districtwide event added to the roster of community engagement and support in August 2014 was the Go Ready! Back-to-School Festival. This event welcomed 2,128 people and provided 600 backpacks filled with school supplies, 50 haircuts and 50 haircut vouchers, 300 pairs of shoes, 500 pairs of socks, free immunization and dental screenings, and information and resources from more than 33 community partners. The GoReady! festival was held again with even more partner involvement in 2015.

Foundational policies that are or could support the strategy for change

Specific internal practices developed by FCRCs have helped the district to scale up and enhance its work, while recent court actions and other changes create opportunities to create new supportive policies.

Availability and use of data to guide decision-making

The district culls data from several sources to shape programming specific to each FCRC and to identify individual students and families who need additional support. Internal and external stakeholders use data from student, family, and community needs surveys to build programs for their schools. Individual school performance data also guide every FCRC’s annual action plan, and FCRC site coordinators use data to identify students with chronic absenteeism and enroll them in attendance programs. In addition, each FCRC collects and reports data related to program attendance, resources, in-kind contributions and grant awards, connections to agencies, and other metrics, and then uses these data to evaluate its work.5

The district’s comprehensive data systems developed out of a question posed to stakeholders during the district’s strategic planning process: “How would you measure the success of the FCRC initiative?” The answers reflect an understanding that while the barriers to student success often are caused by factors beyond a school district’s control, measuring near-term outcomes at the school level, such as attendance and learning outcomes, can guide strategies that lead to long term impact. For example, third, sixth, and ninth grade reading and math scores predict on-time graduation rates. So VPS has sought to combine those data with data on student needs, and direct resources accordingly.

For example, the district’s FCRC team is exploring the connection between resource coordination, family engagement, and partnership growth to address barriers to consistent school attendance.6 With chronic absence defined as missing 18 or more days of instruction, the rate of chronic absence at VPS schools with FCRCs ranges from 17 to 46 percent.7 Linking FCRC strategies to the top known causes of chronic absence—as shown in Table 1—provides a way for school districts to measure and understand the value of their investment and, in turn, assess the degree to which that investment is paying off in terms of helping schools to achieve the particular goal.

The 13-by-18 block area of North Minneapolis, a city with one of the worst achievement gaps in the nation, is a designated racially concentrated area of poverty. The median income for families in the Zone is $18,000, and a full quarter of its 5,500 students are homeless or highly mobile (Minneapolis Public Schools, 2011). Children and families in the Zone are exposed to many risk factors, including high rates of violent crime, poor health, and housing and financial instability. Kindergarten readiness as measured by standardized tests was at 28 percent, while only half of Northside high school students – and only 36 percent of black students – graduated from high school within four years.

Response

Northside Achievement Zone (NAZ) was formed in 2010 as an outgrowth of the PEACE Foundation, an organization committed to ending intergenerational poverty in North Minneapolis.1 After winning a federal Promise Neighborhood implementation grant in 2012, NAZ was able to significantly expand both its services and its scope, partnering with many local non-profits and increasing its prior goal of serving approximately 150 students to 2500 by the end of 2016. Inspired by the Harlem Children’s Zone, the program’s three main goals are: engaging parents to strengthen their ability to support their children’s achievement, improving schools and the education experience through a continuum of services, and providing whole family wrap-around support to stabilize families and households and remove barriers to learning.2

“Minnesota is the land of 10,000 lakes and 10,000 gaps… In North Minneapolis, specifically in the Northside Achievement Zone, the gaps are especially egregious—unemployment, housing, incarceration, education. But with our work, over time, we believe we can narrow many of them.” – Sondra Samuels, NAZ President & CEO

Strategy for Change

The ultimate goal of the Northside Achievement Zone is to end intergenerational poverty in North Minneapolis by creating a continuous cradle-to-college network of support for participating students and their families. As part of this process, NAZ works with a team of leaders, community partners, and dedicated staff to reach its goals. There are three critical elements of this strategy: 1) Families are the unit of change; 2) NAZ can surround each family with all the supports available; and 3) The combination of high-touch and high-tech gives NAZ an advantage over other strategies.

Leadership

The NAZ leadership structure is informed and led by key community members, as part of its strategy to evolve based on community leads and to cultivate community leaders to sustain the effort.

• The organization is led by CEO Sondra Samuels, who has held that position since before NAZ became a Promise Neighborhood.
• A 20-member Board of Directors comprised of local community, business, and political leaders helps to guide the direction of NAZ.
• Family leadership comes from the Parent Advisory Board, which is made up of a core group of Northside Achievement Zone parents who have taken initiative and demonstrated leadership in the program.3
• The Strategic Leadership Team sits at the center of and coordinates the work of NAZ’s Anchor Partners. Each of the eight Action Teams is led jointly by two organizational chairs, and most of the teams have NAZ staff that are co-located at their site. The eight teams work in the areas of: early childhood, K-12 schools, K-8 expanded learning, high school expanded learning, college, career & finance, housing, and health (behavioral and physical).4
• The Impact Committee, which is made up largely of Board members and key community stakeholders, helps NAZ to review the impact of programs, monitors data, and works with Wilder, the external evaluation team, on updates.

Staff

Northside Achievement Zone’s direct service arm is comprised of a team of Connectors who meet regularly with families to identify their needs and connect them to appropriate services, and of Navigators, trained social workers who provide more specific help and services.

• Connectors: Twenty “Connectors,” community members who are trained by NAZ as family coaches, meet regularly with families to help set and track progress on those families’ long term goals. Connectors also provide information about parenting and child development from NAZ training or based on their own experiences, connect families to NAZ’s services and partner organizations, and monitor children’s social and emotional competence in order to identify potential issues early and connect children to appropriate support when necessary. Each family is assigned a single Connector, with whom it will work for the duration of its involvement with NAZ.
  • Connectors serve an average of 27 families each, with a goal of reaching 40. Eighty-four percent of NAZ families are considered to be active participants in the program.5
  • A key strength of Connectors is their strong ties to the community: 83% of Connectors live or have lived within the Zone (90% identify as “Northsiders”), and 30% come from families that participate in NAZ.6
• Navigators: A second key group of NAZ employees whose primary duties involve support for students and families, “Navigators” help families reach goals in specific areas, and many work onsite in schools or at NAZ’s partner organizations. Navigators must possess a Bachelor’s Degree in social work, human services, or another related field.
  • When families join NAZ, they complete a family achievement plan with goals in a range of areas.7 Navigators use these plans to help families move toward and monitor progress.
  • NAZ Navigators specialize in one of five areas: Early childhood, academics, housing, career and finance, or behavioral health.
  • Each of NAZ’s anchor schools houses at least one Navigator and one Connecter.

Partners

• Northside Achievement Zone has 44 core partners, with whom it works closely. These “anchor” partners include ten public, charter, and parochial K-12 schools, twelve early childhood programs, as well as expanded learning (before- and after-school and summer) and mentoring programs, health organizations, housing organizations, and career and finance organizations.8
• NAZ also works closely with Wilder Research, which provides external program evaluation, and with the University of Minnesota’s Center for Early Education and Development (CEED), which partners with NAZ in an advisory capacity and has helped the initiative to design its internal evaluation systems.9

Comprehensive Services

The NAZ model is grounded in participating families’ development of Family Achievement Plans, which set goals across multiple areas and are used to connect families to needed partners and other sources of support so that they can progress toward those goals. The initiative’s continuum of support – which works on both the education and family support tracks – thus encompasses programs that run from prenatal through college.

Early Childhood Services for parents and children

• NAZ provides Family Academy classes for children age 0-5 and elementary students. These classes are designed to provide parents with key tools to support their children’s learning and make progress toward Family Achievement Plan goals. As is true of other NAZ services, the Family Academy curriculum is shaped by, and relevant to, parents’ own experiences and needs. Classes, which enroll a maximum of 15 parents and vary from 8-12 weeks in length, include:
  • Foundations Class, which is geared toward parent empowerment
  • College Bound Babies, for parents of children from birth to age 3, aims to foster early literacy, numeracy, and positive discipline skills. The class also provides children with developmental screenings.
  • Ready to Succeed, for families with 4-5-year-old children, helps parents prepare children for kindergarten.
  • College-Bound Scholars helps parents navigate their children’s path toward college

• Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge Grant funds provide scholarships for students to attend high- quality 3- and 4-tier early childhood centers.10

At home, we’ve started playing learning games whenever we can. I learned how to use praise to encourage behavior and I can’t believe how effective it is! -Family Academy Parents11

School Enrichment

• Anchor Schools: There is at least one Connector and one Navigator present at each of the ten Anchor schools that partner with NAZ.
• Mentor Program: NAZ partners with Big Brothers Big Sisters to connect children with mentors.
• College Prep and Completion: The College Prep Action team is chaired jointly by the Minneapolis Community and Technical College and the University of Minnesota Research and Outreach Center. In February 2015, the team developed a comprehensive plan that identifies “essential active ingredients” and “necessary conditions” for college readiness and success and monitors their dosage/the frequency with which they occur. For example, with respect to early access, one essential active ingredient is “Anchor Partners have a site-based mentoring program to mentor NAZ middle and high school Scholars with current undergraduates.”12 The two-to-four year transition includes the importance of “scholars receiv[ing] individual advising to create long-term pathway to four-year institution.”

“We’re helping our scholars to be academically prepared for college—and for colleges to be prepared for them. We want the pipeline that starts at birth to extend through college. Any of our kids accepted into college should have a team of support, from mentoring and course advice, to professors who use cultural competency in both what and how they teach.” -Jaimee Bohning, NAZ Education Director

Expanded Learning Opportunities

• Northside Achievement Zone connects students with 12 after-school and summer partner programs, including Big Brothers and Big Sisters of the Greater Twin Cities, Plymouth Christian Youth Center, Project Success, and YMCA to offer programs at seven partner sites.
• Through these programs, students receive academic and college preparatory help, mentorship, and arts education. For example, one summer program was held at a local community college, in order to foster dual goals of improving academic performance and increasing access to and familiarity with post-secondary education options.
• In 2014, Teach For America formed a partnership with the University of Minnesota to create a summer program that served 200 NAZ students13
• Also in 2014, NAZ won a grant from the Robert Wood Foundation, which allowed the initiative to expand its Expanded Learning services to middle school students.14
• NAZ CEO Sondra Samuels estimates that, among those expanded learning programs that are openly available, about half of participants are NAZ scholars, while half are not.

Health

• Behavioral and Health Navigators are licensed social workers who support parents’ and students health issues and work to prevent crises from arising where possible.
• A collaboration between NAZ and local health providers is currently in planning stages.

Family supports

• NAZ Connect: NAZ connect is an online achievement planning and data collection system that families to create sets of goals, called Achievement Plans. The goals are tracked online and monitored with the support of the family’s Connector.15
• Parent Services: Career & Finance Navigators provide one-to-one support for parents to provide information and direct them towards appropriate services in three areas: employment, finance, and adult education
• Housing: After three months of participation in NAZ, families are connected with a Housing Navigator, who will support them with the aim of connecting families to stable and affordable housing.

“Before we would have housing doing their thing over there in North Minneapolis, behavior health doing their thing, after school doing their thing, the schools doing their thing, but families and children don’t come in pieces.” -NAZ CEO Sondra Samuels16

 Funding

Northside Achievement Zone was started with and is supported by a mix of public and private funds. In 2015, the total NAZ operating budget was $7.7 million, with 56 percent coming from its Federal Promise Neighborhood Grant, 13 percent from other sources of public funding including Title 1 and Race to the Top, 22 percent from institutional philanthropy, and 9 percent from individual donations.

Public

• In 2011, NAZ won a $28 million United States Department of Education Promise Neighborhood grant, to be dispersed in five annual allocations of $5.6 million.17 Before becoming a Promise Neighborhood, the pilot project had a $1.1 million annual budget, funded entirely privately, through a mix of foundation money and individual donations.18
• In 2011, Minnesota was awarded a $45 million Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge Grant funds, which allowed NAZ to provide 127 scholarships for students to attend high-quality early learning centers in the 2012-13 school year, and 156 in the 2013-14 school year.19
• In 2015, North Minneapolis was designated a federal Promise Zone, making it a priority for future funding and giving the region preference on federal grant applications. Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges wants to use the region’s Promise Zone status to expand existing programs, including the Northside Achievement Zone.20

Private

There are a number of foundations and corporations that have provided long-standing support. For example, General Mills Foundation and Target Corporation each awarded NAZ $3M over the next three years as a leadership investment to support sustainability post federal grant.

Foundational Policies and Practices

Community Involvement Grounds the Work

Northside Achievement Zone is grounded in the belief that the closely intertwined goals of closing achievement gaps, improving family well-being, and enabling community development must be led and sustained by strong community leaders. Its practices are all developed based on that philosophy, from working with parents to set their own Achievement Plan goals and inviting parents to become Advisory Board members to Family Academy curriculum that is relevant to their lives. NAZ holds a monthly roundtable meeting that is open to the public to discuss and analyze practices, progress and accountability. Each meeting focuses on one of NAZ’s “action areas” and is attended by the NAZ CEO, Board or Impact Committee members, two Parent Advisory Board members, a rotation of management team members, and a representative from the action team whose topic is being discussed.21

Systems change and sustainability

In order to realize the goal of ending multi-generational poverty within the Zone and the surrounding area, NAZ is focused on achieving and sustaining population-level results with families and children. Understanding that the key to sustaining results includes but is not limited to replacing financial resources, NAZ and its partners (including parents) are working on going beyond the implementation phase to deepen and expand their work collectively and individually. The entire NAZ collaborative across the Northside community is supported in this endeavor by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which is funding NAZ participation in its 18-month results based leadership program. This program aims to increase the scope of the NAZ work– ensuring the integration and effectiveness of its solutions; reaching scale– by ensuring that enough families and children are succeeding in the NAZ Ecosystem to have an impact on the entire population; improving funding mechanisms; and using the influence and experience of the partners and parents to change systems and policy. To date, close to 100 NAZ and partner staff have been involved in on-going on-the-ground results training utilizing the solutions, goals and results to date to drive skill-building and deepen the potential for a results based culture to be imbedded throughout the Northside among key stakeholders.

Setting Ambitious Goals to Drive Progress

Understanding that real progress takes time, NAZ has established ambitious 10-year goals similar to those put forth by many of the Promise Neighborhood grantees. The goal is to set benchmarks that enable incremental progress along the way and that motivate NAZ staff, volunteers, and families to reach for bigger gains. Long-term goals include:

• Increasing kindergarten readiness from 28% to 80%. (Prior to the change in assessments, NAZ children who had scholarships to 3- and 4-star early learning centers were above 80% in reading, versus 73% among those who lacked access to scholarships.)22
• Reading at grade level by third grade from 16% to 70%23
• Grade level math proficiency at 8^th grade from 29% to 70%
• Graduation on time, prepared for college from 51% to 80%24

Time-limited competitive federal grants: Benefits and Challenges to Long-Term Sustainability

• Promise Neighborhood Grants: In the hopes of replicating the success of the Harlem Children’s Zone, the Obama Administration created the federal Promise Neighborhood program in 2010. The program allocates money in the form of competitive grants to non-profits and institutions of higher education to create “a continuum of cradle-to-career solutions” for low-achieving, high poverty school districts. The grants are distributed over the course of 5 years, and are meant to give programs the opportunity to demonstrate their potential for success so that they can attract private investors after the grant runs out.25
• NAZ has stated that after the Promise Neighborhood Grant runs out, the core initiative will need to maintain an annual budget of $7.6 million order to remain self-sustaining. In order to achieve this, it projects that other public funding must grow by 260 percent, individual donations by 230 percent, and foundation money by 200 percent from 2015 numbers, for a total of $5.6 million in additional funding. NAZ also projects that its partners will require an additional $5.2 million (for a total of $11.6 million) in funding in order to continue providing the same level of services to NAZ families.26

• Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge: RTT-ELC is a competitive federal grant program initiated in 2011. Grants are awarded to states with the purpose of increasing both the scope and quality of early childhood education, as well as alignment across programs and with the K-12 system, with a particular emphasis on extending access to low-income families who otherwise would not be able to send their children to preschool.27

Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge Fund grants provide roughly $10,000 per child for high-quality pre-k programs. While the state recently appropriated $100 million in scholarship funds for high-risk families to send their children to the highest-quality programs, and worked with NAZ to direct funds to children who would lose ELC funds when that grant ran out, state funds allot only $7,500, so NAZ must develop a strategy to close that funding gap.

• Promise Zones Initiative: The federal Promise Zone designation is meant to foster economic opportunity through tax incentives, AmeriCorps VISTA members, and preference on future competitive federal grant applications. The initiative was announced in early 2014, and currently 13 regions hold the designation.

Indicators of Progress

Because NAZ is a relatively new initiative, many indicators relate to service provided and/or families reached, rather than to milestones toward outcomes or longer-term goals.

Reaching Kids and Families

• As of fall 2015, Northside Achievement Zone was serving 870 families with 1870 “scholars,” each of whom is assigned a Connector.28
• Half of NAZ families meet with their Connector at least once a month, while 87% of families are reported to be working actively with their Connectors. 80% of Connectors have 40 or fewer families. Although best practice in similar service models (e.g., the Nurse-Family Partnership home visiting program) suggests a maximum of no more than 25 families, NAZ believes that its numbers work because families have both different levels of intensity and types of needs.

• In 2014, Connectors linked 183 scholars to early learning centers, an increase of nearly 50 percent from 125 at the end of 2013, and exceeding the end-of-year target of 150.29
• 84% of 2014 early childhood scholars completed their checklists (i.e., they were connected to all of the resources and activities that NAZ sees as central to success). 80 percent exceeded their end-of-year goals, up substantially from 66 percent in 2013, and percentages for K-12 students were also up, from 45 percent in 2013 to 69 percent in 2014.
• Children in NAZ-enrolled families were more likely to have had early childhood screenings in 2015 than in 2010 (78 percent versus 66 percent), and, among other children to have participated in an afterschool activity (82 percent versus 63 percent), and they were twice as likely as those of non-enrolled families to be in center-based child care (28 percent versus 14 percent).30
• Zone parents were more likely in 2015 than in 2012 to be involved in their children’s schools, to make school and academics and priority, and to be focused on sending their children to college.31

Housing32

• Between 2012 and mid-2015, the number of families that NAZ attempted to connect to stable housing grew from 48 to 349, and the number of families who were successfully connected to stable housing increased from 30 to 192.33
• In 2013, 37 families attained stable rental housing through NAZ, and the average number of moves for these families was reduced by two thirds in just one year: from 1.46 in 2012 to 0.51. Nearly 100 families found stable rental housing in 2014, with their average number of moves dropping greatly, from 1.80 in the previous year to just 0.23.

Northside Achievement Zone is also starting to see some preliminary improvements in student academic outcomes.

Strengthening reading and math skills

NAZ assesses four specific academic benchmarks: students’ readiness for kindergarten,34 their reading level in 3^rd grade, their math proficiency/level in 8^th grade,35 and their on-time high school graduation at college preparatory level.36

• In 2013-2014, 49% of NAZ scholars were deemed to be ready for kindergarten, compared to 35% for the entire Zone.37
• Students participating in NAZ saw an increase in “proficiency” on the MCA, the state exam, from 14 percent (of 44 who were tested) in 2012-2013 to 22 percent (of 69 who were tested) in 2013-2014.38 In addition, scholars who had enrolled in NAZ in 2013 saw larger increases in standardized test scores than those who enrolled in 2014, suggesting that longer participation is associated with higher standardized test scores.
• Students who attended Northside Achievement Zone’s extended learning summer programs at one or more of NAZ’ partner sites saw average increases on reading test scores between the end of one school year and the beginning of the next, during a period in which scores normally decrease.39
• Overall, the highest gains from 2013-2014 were between 1^st and 2^nd grade, while the lowest were between 7^th and 8^th 40There is not yet enough data to assess progress toward goals for high school students.

We know that this trend – of making more progress in the early grades – mirrors that of other, similar efforts to improve academic outcomes. But keep in mind that a lot of these early numbers come from years in which programs for younger children had been well established, while those targeting older youth were in not yet fully built. While we know that it’s easier to turn around the trajectories of younger kids, we are fully committed to supporting every child in the Zone. -Jaimee Bohning, NAZ Education Director

Public recognition/awards

CEO Sondra Samuels notes the major increase in traction that NAZ has gained, characterizing 2015 as a “whirlwind of exposure, rising visibility, and investment.”

• In October 2015, the Minnesota Business Partnership awarded NAZ its 2015 Minnesota’s Future Award for efforts to close achievement gaps in North Minneapolis. In partnership with Target and General Mills, the MBP awarded NAZ $6 million. Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton, who spoke at the event, told the nearly 1,000 business, civic, and community leaders present that, “I fault myself for not starting this initiative sooner. I guarantee, however, that it will be a top priority from now on. I ask that you make it one of your top priorities as well. Not only is it the right thing to do, it is also critical to our state’s economic future.”41
• In March 2015, the Minneapolis Regional Chamber of Commerce recognized NAZ as the 2015 Best Nonprofit.42

Contact

Sondra Samuels, [email protected], or visit http://northsideachievement.org/

Endnotes

1. Leaders of another organization, 500 under 5, along with a broad group of community leaders, built on that original plan/vision to create NAZ, before merging with NAZ in 2010.

2. NAZ History | NAZ Website

3. NAZ Newsletter: Fall 2014 | NAZ Website

4.  http://northsideachievement.org/naz-partner/i/Leadership-graphic81.jpg

5. NAZ Connect Jan 1, 2016.

6. NAZ Internal Evaluation Report: Family Engagement (October 2014)

7.  http://northsideachievement.org/what-we-do/solutions/#nazconnect

8. Our Partners | NAZ Website

9. http://www.cehd.umn.edu/ceed/projects/nazevaluation/default.html

10. Evaluation of Minnesota’s Race to the Top-Early Learning Challenge: Scholarships and Title I PreK Incentives | NAZ Website

11. NAZ Education Pipeline, NAZ Family Academy.

12. College Success Solution Plan, http://northsideachievement.org/wp-content/uploads/CollegeSuccessActionPlan.FinalTeamEdits.Feb2015-2-2.pdf

13. NAZ Newsletter: Summer 2014 | NAZ Website

14. NAZ Newsletter Spring 2014 | NAZ Website

15. Solutions | NAZ Website

16. Josh Rosenthal, “Minn. Nonprofit Sees Big Return on Investment Gap Investment,” KSTP Eyewitness News. March 20, 2015.

17. I’d note here that HCZ, on which Promise Neighborhoods are modeled, has an annual operating budget in the ballpark of $70 million. Not sure how NAZ compares in size, but it’s helpful to compare and to point to that contrast as part of the challenge they face.

18. Northside Achievement Zone Promise Neighborhood Application

19.  Evaluation of Minnesota’s Race to the Top-Early Learning Challenge Access Strategies: Scholarships and Title I PreK Incentives- Year 2 | NAZ Website. NOTE: High quality is defined as a center ranked with three or four stars in the state’s Quality Rating and Improvement System/QRIS, by Parent Aware.

20.  http://www.startribune.com/minneapolis-officials-hope-promise-zone-boosts-aid-to-north-side/301634281/

21. Results NAZ | NAZ Website

22. Due to a change in assessments since NAZ’s inception and the use of scholarships, it is not possible to compare readiness scores across time. Note that these numbers reflect only reading and only for NAZ-enrolled children, while the readiness numbers below are for both reading and math and include non-enrolled families.

23. Reading and math proficiency is measured by Minnesota’s statewide standardized test, called the MCA or Minnesota Comprehensive Exam.

24. Graduation rates across all three NAZ partner high schools are measured by the MN Department of Education.

25. Promise Neighborhoods Program | US Department of Education

26. Northside Achievement Zone Business Plan FY 2015-FY2022

27. Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge | US Department of Education

28. NAZ refers to all individuals enrolled in their program as scholar, regardless of age

29. All data in this section are from NAZ Internal Evaluation Report: Family Engagement (October 2014)

30. Wilder Research, January 2016 Summary of 2015 Community Survey Results. www.wilderresearch.org

31. Wilder Research, January 2016 Summary of 2015 Community Survey Results. www.wilderresearch.org

32. All data in this section are from NAZ Internal Report: Housing (April 2015)

33. NAZ Data Dashboard 2015.

34. Until 2014, this designation had been based on the Beginning of Kindergarten Assessment (BKA) that was developed and administered by the Minneapolis Public Schools and that included literacy and numeracy skills. Because “proficiency” was pegged to predicted success on the third grade MCA, since 2014 those levels have been in flux. There is no common tests across districts in the state.

35. Grade-level reading and math “proficiency” are defined by the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment, the standards-based assessment used by the state to measure progress toward the state’s academic standards and that was used to fulfill requirements under the federal No Child Left Behind Act. Due to changes in the standards against which proficiency is measured, as well as changes in the test design and administration, there have been breaks in the trend line in the past few years. Both math and reading are now in their third version, and each new version has been introduced in a way that precludes comparison to previous test results. (from Sondra Samuels email)

36. All following information is from Northside Achievement Zone 2014 Year-End Report unless noted otherwise

37. Readiness measure based on 2013 scores from Beginning Kindergarten Assessment (BKA).

38. Wilder Research, 2014 Northside Achievement Zone Year End Report, Figure 5.

39. 2014 Mid-Year Reading Report

40. 2014 Mid-Year Reading Report

41. Al McFarlane and B.P. Ford, “North Minneapolis: Creating the World’s Best Workforce,” Insight News. October 21, 2015.

42. Josh Rosenthal (2015).

In the 1990s, the Boston Public Schools district and its schools lacked a systematic approach to connect urban schoolchildren with the rich resources of the city’s community partners and to efficiently address the out-of-school factors impeding students’ academic success, especially for students living in poverty. The city was at a low point in its population, down from over 800,000 in 1950 to under 600,000 throughout the 1990s, while the share of that population that was non-white – Hispanic and Asian in particular – was growing, as was the share that was foreign-born. ¹ One in four students was dropping out of city schools before graduation.²

Response

City Connects was created in 1999 as an evidence-based, scalable practice in Boston. Following an initial meeting in the early 1990s focused on addressing out-of-school barriers to learning at a Boston public elementary school, a two-year planning effort developed as a collaboration among Boston College Lynch School of Education, Boston Public Schools, and local partners, including community agencies.

“In an iterative process, [Boston College and Boston Public Schools partners] repeatedly convened school principals, teachers, other school and district staff, representatives of community agencies, and families to develop a system that re-organized the work schools have traditionally done in the area of student support (e.g., the work carried out by school counselors, nurses, psychologists, and community partners). The resulting system met the criteria of best practices and was initially implemented in Boston schools in 2001.”³

With its foundations in the “full-service” or community school model, City Connects allows districts and schools to wrap needed supports, enrichments, and services around students in order to address barriers standing in the way of school success. The practice engages every classroom teacher, leverages community resources, and ensures that each student receives the tailored supports and enrichment opportunities necessary to learn effectively and thrive in school.

Due to its success, City Connects has been successfully replicated and scaled. It is currently implemented in 100 schools in five states, including other districts in Massachusetts as well as in New York, Connecticut, Ohio, and Minnesota. It will also be in Indiana starting in the fall of 2018.

Strategy for Change

Grounded in evidence, City Connects is a system that organizes student support and leverages existing school and community-based resources in order to improve students’ academic and social-emotional outcomes. As a hub of student support, a full-time social worker or school counselor who becomes the dedicated City Connects site coordinator meets with each classroom teacher and other school staff to identify each child’s strengths and unmet needs. Together, in consultation with families and other adults who know each child, they develop an individualized plan designed to meet the students’ needs and cultivate his or her strengths. Each student is then connected to a tailored set of prevention and intervention services and enrichment opportunities in the school and/or community, with the goal of helping every child to be ready to learn and engage in school.

Using their knowledge of the particular needs of the school, and of gaps in existing services, school site coordinators cultivate partnerships with community agencies, serving as a point of contact for the school. They collaborate closely with families to facilitate access to supports and enrichments. They also use proprietary software to document, track, and report on service referrals for each student, and they follow up to assure service delivery, and assess effectiveness.

Before entering a district, City Connects collaborates with district partners to conduct a needs assessment. The process typically occurs in the spring before the academic year in which the implementation launch is planned. City Connects consults school leaders, teachers, families, and community partners to understand the particular assets and challenges of the community. The process also includes a community scan to identify providers of supports and services in the city. Building on this knowledge, City Connects collaborates with district partners to prepare for launching the intervention.⁴

Coalition

City Connects draws on a variety of public and private partners to deliver aligned student supports. Its work in Boston Public Schools, its longest-running site, illustrates this collaboration.

• Boston Public Schools— In 2017–18, City Connects was operating in 20 Boston public schools with over 8,000 students (pre-K to 8). Approximately half of the students in City Connects schools speak a language other than English at home, and over 80 percent are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch.
• Community Agencies—A critical role of the City Connects school site coordinator is developing and maintaining partnerships with community agencies and institutions. In Boston, City Connects has cultivated more than 320 community partnerships that provide resources and support to students and their families. In 2016-17, these partnerships enabled City Connects to connect approximately 8,000 Boston students to 64,940 enrichment opportunities and services delivered by 275 unique providers. Partners include:
  • Public: Boston Centers for Youth and Families, Boston Public Health Commission, and the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation.
  • Private: Big Brothers Big Sisters of Mass. Bay, Boys & Girls Club, Salvation Army, and YMCA of Greater Boston.
  • Higher Education Institutions: University-based programs include the Boston University Initiative for Literacy Development and the CIVICS Program at Harvard University, a tutoring program at Boston College, and health programs at Tufts Medical Center.
• Boston College—The Center for Optimized Student Support at Boston College co- designed and led the implementation of City Connects in schools, and Boston College’s Center for the Study of Testing, Evaluation, and Education Policy collects, analyzes, and reports on City Connects data. External experts provide independent reviews of the initiative’s methods, results, and conclusions.
• Leadership—City Connects maintains its partnerships with Boston’s community agencies and institutions by convening school-level as well as city-wide meetings of representatives from the school system and community. In addition to sharing aggregate data on services and outcomes, these gatherings focus on issues of current concern, such as support for immigrant families, the needs of homeless students and families, addressing the opioid epidemic, family engagement, and the impact of student health on achievement. The meetings also serve as a way for agencies located across the city to share updates and discover areas of potential synergy.

Comprehensive Services

In order to fulfill its mission of addressing barriers to learning, City Connects works with its coalition partners to provide a range of supports for students and their families. These services are provided through a system that includes assessment of student needs and strengths, development of individualized support plans and of partnerships to support those needs and strengths, tracking, and follow-up.

•  Assessment—Each school has a licensed school counselor or social worker who serves as a City Connects school site coordinator. There is one coordinator for about every 400 students. The School Site Coordinator works with each teacher to review the strengths and needs of every student in his or her class through a process called the Whole Class Review, which helps identify individual students’ strengths and needs across academic, social/emotional/ behavioral, physical health, and family domains.
• Development of Support Plans—The School Site Coordinator then develops a customized support plan for each student that addresses his or her individual strengths and needs. City Connects is unique in that it focuses heavily not only on meeting student’s needs, but on enhancing their assets. Any given student may receive services in any combination of the following three categories:
  • Prevention and enrichment (e.g., sports and physical activity, before- and after- school programs, classes in music, drama, or the arts).
  • Early intervention (e.g., tutoring, mentoring, behavior plans, health supports, family outreach).
  • Intensive or crisis intervention (e.g., intensive mental health and medical services, violence intervention).
• Development of Partnerships—The school site coordinator identifies and locates appropriate school- and/or community-based services and enrichments and helps establish the connections between these service providers and individual children and their families.
• Follow-up—City Connects tracks referrals and service delivery with a proprietary electronic data management system, the Student Support Information System (SSIS), which also houses a database of all City Connects community partners. The system captures information about individual students’ strengths and needs, as identified by the teacher and coordinator in different developmental domains, including academic, social/emotional/ behavioral, health, and family. It provides a way for coordinators to document and track individual service plans. To make the referral process efficient, it includes information about community partners, such as ages served, hours of service, location, and categories of services offered.This system supports appropriate and secure record-keeping at the individual and school level, monitoring and evaluating the implementation of the City Connects practice throughout the school year, and enabling research to be conducted on the effectiveness of the interventions.⁵

Whole-class review is at the heart of City Connects’ work with the dozens of high-poverty schools it supports. The process provides the kind of personalized learning and support that most schools, even those with much lower levels of severe need, can only dream of. At the start of the school year, the City Connects site coordinator sits down with every teacher to explore each student’s unique strengths and needs. That hour-long meeting enables teachers and coordinators to reflect on the student’s progress over the prior year, identify ways to further advance that progress, and target preventive and remedial supports to unmet needs that may have changed over the year, whether academic, social, emotional, or physical. Students are grouped into tiers that reflect their current mix of strengths and risks across developmental domains. Students in Tier 3 receive the most services, an average of seven, to address their extensive needs and, in many cases, crisis situations. Each school year, 11-12 percent of students are placed in this tier, but due to progress, nearly half move into a lower tier over the course of the school year. 

In the Bronx, the process has enabled some of New York City’s highest-poverty schools to ensure that children are connected to the supports many have long lacked, like enriching afterschool opportunities, and empowered teachers to address social, emotional, and behavioral barriers they know their students face to learning effectively. In one Boston elementary school, the information gathered from whole-class reviews led the City Connects site coordinator to develop a Health and Wellness Committee that has brought the school, among other things, Healthy Family Fun Nights, bike helmets, fresh food trucks, a Cooking Challenge, and a garden where students work with faculty and staff to clean up beds, plant the seeds, and watch flowers and food grow. John Winthrop Elementary School site coordinator Jaymie Silverman says she “appreciate[s] the whole class review process because it … also forces us to highlight the strengths of every student. And oftentimes it’s just easy, especially with some of our most challenging students [and in neighborhoods like Dorchester], to get bogged down in the things that aren’t working well and the challenges that teachers encounter on a daily basis.” ⁶

Early Childhood Education: The City Connects intervention can help all children to learn and thrive in school, but the practice is particularly well-suited to meet the needs and cultivate the strengths of early learners. In the early childhood setting, supports and enrichments can be put in place while critical early development is rapidly evolving. Also, early childhood is a time of strong family involvement, meaning that close family collaboration in development of support plans is often possible. With support from the Better Way Foundation, City Connects has acted on this understanding to implement an Early Childhood adaptation of City Connects, beginning in 2009 in child care settings in Catholic schools, and now in all of its sites that serve an early childhood population. ⁷

Because parents are so close to their children at this stage and can tell coordinators so much, one City Connects program manager, who was formerly a preschool teacher, has developed a new intake form that asks about issues like family structure, custody issues, bedtime routines, and health screenings and motor skills (e.g., zipping, buttoning, and hopping). Toylee Cigna asks “Can you get family members more engaged in their child’s education process? That may be all that’s needed.” While the focus in early childhood settings is on early childhood development and family engagement, however, the same whole class review and tiered strength-and-risk- mix used in K-12 settings is applied. So a small social skills group might take place in the preschool classroom, and creative use of Legos could be the strength around which a child’s interventions are based. ⁸

In addition, state and federal early childhood initiatives have boosted City Connects efforts. In prek-5 and prek-8 public schools served by City Connects where UPK classrooms are located, City Connects students benefit from Boston’s high-quality UPK program. Although both federally funded grants have lapsed, some current City Connects students enjoyed early childhood support from state-level NGA and Race to the Top Early Learning Grant initiatives. Boston is also a recipient of the Preschool Expansion Grant, but while that has spurred discussions about moving towards universal prekindergarten in the city, no concrete plan has yet emerged.

Health, Mental, and Dental Health: Because City Connects advances whole-child education, student wellness is at the core of much of its support for students’ health, and supports are targeted based on the type and level of need. Preventive supports, for example, could include the New Balance Health and Wellness Curriculum, while early interventions might involve classroom-based social skills or health interventions. Family counseling, violence intervention, attention to unmet dental needs, and health services to address chronic problems like asthma would be appropriate services for students needing intensive interventions. (City Connects knows that any given student might benefit from less intensive preventive and enrichment services at some points and more intensive/responsive ones in other contexts.)

Coordinators also provide referrals to services in the community and/or school that span these three categories. For example, one coordinator held conversations with parents on nutrition when she met them at the school food bank. This coordinator reported that parents in turn began to focus on nutrition labels when making food selections. In another school, two students who had experienced traumatic injuries were referred for physical activity both to aid in their recovery and to relieve stress. The coordinator worked closely with staff at a YMCA to customize a plan that involved swimming and physical training. ⁹

In-school and afterschool and summer enrichment: City Connects enables students to leverage the wide variety of enrichment offerings in a city. In Boston, these include youth dance programs offered in collaboration with ballet companies; urban sports programs in biking, rowing, tennis, and lacrosse; and youth development programs offered through community centers and Boys’ and Girls’ Clubs. For Tier I students, the majority of those served by City Connects, programs could be offered before or after school, over the summer, and/or during vacations.

Family engagement: As a regular part of the City Connects practice, Coordinators establish strong ties with families to facilitate communication. When they get to know families or learn from teachers about family strengths and needs, coordinators facilitate referrals to providers of clothing and supplies, parent support, and housing resources.

One Boston teacher says:

Our City Connects coordinator is … not only resourceful and proactive because she establishes and strengthens relationships with community partners, but she simply knows and cares about the students. Talking with her about individuals is always helpful to understanding how students think, get motivated, and ultimately learn.

Foundational Policies and Practices

City Connects’ success in supporting students, its expansion within Boston Public Schools and to other districts and states, and its ability to become self-sustaining is supported by specific practices and policies, both internal to the initiative and based at the local and state levels. Some of these go back to the early days of City Connects, while others are much more recent.

Focus on Resilience and Enhancing Student Strengths

While the needs of many students are extensive, City Connects also believes strongly that students bring unique assets to their classrooms, and that identifying and working to nurture those strengths is key to engaging students and, ultimately, helping them succeed and thrive in school and beyond.

Many students struggle with reading and math proficiency, says Executive Director Mary Walsh, which makes such subjects as music, art, and physical activity all the more important. City Connects enables students to leverage the rich variety of cultural offerings that Boston has to offer, including a wide range of museums, arts classes, and more.

• The practice of assessing every student means that teachers and schools can focus not only on needs but on strengths, with the implicit objective of building resilience. City Connects is focused not only on students in serious need, but on a broader range of students who stand to benefit from an emphasis on enrichment over remediation. One example is the small-group health promotion workshops developed and tested by City Connects, which explore such issues as getting along with peers and handling frustration with teachers productively.
• Because City Connects leverages and builds on a wide range of resources that already exist in the schools and in the surrounding community, it makes civic infrastructure – community agencies, programs, and resources – work better for children and families.
  • For example, City Connects works with districts to reinvigorate the work of school counselors, offering successful practices from its model. Therefore, even though this may involve offering new training to existing employees, it can be considered analogous to teachers implementing a new reading or mathematics curriculum, rather than to a change in job description. It also builds on other existing structures, such as Student Support Teams; and aligns with and transforms siloed programs related to student support — like those targeting social-emotional learning, positive behavioral interventions, and multi-tiered systems of support – into a child-centered and effective system of student support.

In the Bronx, City Connects was recruited by the Children’s Aid Society, to deploy its data-based approach to ensure that children in a very high-needs community school did not “fall through the cracks.” In addition to enacting a new theatre program that responded to strengths discovered among a large group of students, City Connects and CAS realized through the whole class review process that they had a large group of new immigrant students, prompting the creation of a newcomers group that enabled students to discuss anxieties about their immigrant status and explore their circumstances in a safe space. ¹⁰ This reflects a reallocation of existing personnel resources to be more responsive to student needs.

“I’ve been teaching for 23 years (16 in Boston). This is my toughest class in all years of teaching; academically and socially/emotionally. I’m extremely serious when I say that I’m not sure I would have survived this year without our coordinator.” -Boston Public teacher¹¹

Involvement of District Leadership

School-level efforts tend to be relatively easy to coordinate. The bigger challenge is knitting them together and aligning them with (and getting support for them from) district-level practices. City Connects has benefitted from the start from such support, in particular collaboration with then-Boston Public Schools superintendent Thomas Payzant. The school district did not provide financial support at the outset, but rather offered the use of data to drive practice—reflecting the superintendent’s deep commitment across all aspects of education. The superintendent annually reviewed City Connects’ outcomes, advised the initiative on direction, and supported fundraising efforts. As noted by Mary Walsh, executive director of City Connects and Daniel Kearns Professor at Boston College, “The superintendent’s commitment to an evidence base was aligned with our goals and made it easier to enter Boston Schools.”

• In Springfield (Mass.) Public Schools, where City Connects has been working since 2010, the district builds site coordinator salaries into its budget and has a licensing agreement with City Connects. The agreement includes professional development and training, coaching, program evaluation, fidelity monitoring, technical assistance, and access to the SSIS data system.

The City of Salem, under the leadership of Mayor Kim Driscoll, linked City Connects’ work to a broader citywide effort called Our Salem, Our Kids.

State Education Reform Act

Massachusetts state education reform policies, which were initiated in 1993, have long included a focus on supporting students with extensive out-of-school challenges. City Connects closely aligns with the state’s growing emphasis on creating safe and supportive school environments and meeting students’ comprehensive needs so that they are ready to learn and engage in school.

City Connects was designated by the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education as a “Priority Partner” in the state’s efforts, since 2011, to promote wraparound services in school districts.¹² This designation allowed districts seeking a wraparound strategy as a lever for school turnaround to choose City Connects as the provider. The State also supported City Connects to study sustainability for interventions that address out-of-school challenges for children living in poverty.

Health Care

Health care policy changes have made it possible for City Connects staff to refer students to essential routine and episodic health care services. In 2006, Governor Mitt Romney passed health reform to provide near-universal health insurance coverage for Massachusetts that included an individual mandate. The proportion of the state’s population that had health insurance rose from 90 percent to 98 percent, the highest in the country, and as of 2011, virtually all children—99.8 percent—had health insurance coverage.¹³

The law also expanded Medicaid enrollment for adults and children with disabilities and the long-term unemployed and raised the family income ceiling for the Children’s Health Insurance Program from 200 percent of the federal poverty level to 300 percent.¹⁴ While City Connects has no direct access to Medicaid funds, it has established a consistent practice of talking to families and providers about drawing on Medicaid coverage to support both physical and mental health services. The initiative also ensures that it refers students who require such care to insurance-eligible providers.¹⁵

Most recently, the state announced a Medicaid waiver that will allow schools to seek reimbursement for health, mental health, and dental services for all students in need, not just those with an Individual Education Plan/IEP. The waiver policy will go into effect in July 2019.

Pre-K

 Various state funding streams support enrollment in pre-k classrooms for children with special needs and their typically developing peers in public school classrooms. City Connects has begun to align its implementation with this emphasis on early childhood by expanding the intervention to this age group, and most of the children it serves are in such classrooms. ¹⁶

Massachusetts was also awarded a federal Preschool Expansion Grant that was used to support the expansion of pre-K across the mixed delivery system (ie public schools, private non-profit community-based providers, Head Start) in five Massachusetts cities (Boston, Springfield, Holyoke, Lawrence, and Lowell). There is a provision in that grant to include “comprehensive services,” and that has been variously interpreted in the five communities. In Springfield, the city created an early learning center that brings all of these different providers under one roof. City Connects is serving in the early learning center. The PEG grant is in its final year, however, and the state does not have a plan for continued funding. ¹⁷

School Turnaround

Although state and federal policies have generally been limited in their inclusion of student support initiatives, City Connects has been able to engage in school “turnaround” efforts through federal School Improvement Grants (SIGs) as well as leveraging state-level policies.

• As part of the state’s federal Race to the Top grant, which has now expired, City Connects was selected by district administrators as one of the levers for school turnaround in Level 4/5 schools. SIG funds also helped support some of these efforts. The state also had its own “Wraparound Zone” initiative parallel to efforts under federally funded SIG, though these no longer are in operation. Springfield, which was among the districts with schools targeted for wraparound turnaround models, chose City Connects to be its partner. Other districts chose to use self-described “homegrown models.”
• Student support was a priority of the previous state Secretary of Education, Paul Reville, but his proposal to fund it in Mass.’s 24 “Gateway Cities” was not approved in the governor’s 2013 budget.

Recent foundations for ISS:¹⁸

The state’s 2008 passage of the Act Relative to Children’s Mental Health, which established a Behavioral Health and Public Schools task force, set in motion collaboration between schools and behavioral health service providers. The task force’s final report, in 2011, provides a three-part self-assessment tool for schools to prevent and address student mental health problems. This law, along with a 2010 bullying prevention law, laid the foundations for the 2014 Act Relative to the Reduction of Gun Violence, which established a Safe and Supportive Schools Commission to advance implementation of the Safe and Supportive Schools Framework. In 2015, this became a core state education priority, and the Commission is developing a statewide framework to help schools integrate social-emotional learning and behavioral health, including community-based resources to provide them, into their work. In all, these laws promote the early identification and prevention of behavior and mental health problems and help equip schools to address them.

At the same time, former Governor Deval Patrick initiated efforts to advance inter-agency collaboration, including the establishment of the Child and Youth Readiness Cabinet, which brings together the Departments of Education, Health and Human Services, and several others that touch children.¹⁹ The cabinet worked toward an early warning system to identify children at risk of failure and explored the creation of a statewide data reporting system to ensure smooth sharing and transfer of key information. While Governor Baker disbanded the cabinet, much of the collaborative work has been sustained, and an executive order funds 18 Family Resource Centers across the state that provide a range of parenting and family and child support resources.

The state education department has also made progress on an early warning indicator system that uses data to identify students in all grades at risk of failure so that schools can target appropriate supports, both academic and non-academic, to get them back on track. Some districts use Multi-Tiered Systems of Support, and data sharing across agencies allows schools to enroll eligible students for supports like subsidized school meals or Medicaid. And in 2018, Governor Charlie Baker established a new interagency working group focused on preventive and systemic approaches to student support that includes staff from two key departments: Elementary and Secondary Education and Health and Human Services.

Funding

The Center for Benefit-Cost Studies in Education at Columbia University conducted an independent analysis that estimated the cost to implement City Connects at about $250 per pupil per year (excluding the costs of community services). A more recent study finds that schools currently spend roughly $150 per year on student supports, and that City Connects adds about $130 to that. This cost is shared by public and private funders.

Public

Some federal and state funding, including Race to the Top funding allocated by districts to City Connects, has helped to defray these costs. In addition, districts have contributed by including City Connects in their budgets.

Private

City Connects has been supported by a number of foundations, including the Charles Hayden, Barr, New Balance, Mathile Family, and Better Way Foundations, Strategic Grant Partners, and the Philanthropic Initiative. These partners have supported central program implementation and/or evaluation.

Indicators of Progress

These comprehensive changes to how schools are structured and the way they link students to needed supports have resulted in a range of benefits, both academic and other. ²⁰ Longitudinal, peer-reviewed evidence shows that students in City Connects schools have better effort, grades, and attendance and that the model can significantly narrow achievement gaps and reduce high school drop-out rates. And principals and teachers report significant benefits to school climate, job satisfaction, understanding of the whole child, and improved teacher-student relationships.

Academic/student gains

Student performance and principal satisfaction measures document academic and student gains. Over a decade of rigorous, peer-reviewed research on City Connects finds that students enrolled in a City Connects elementary school have significantly higher performance in both academic and so-called noncognitive skills not only in those years, but also after they leave City Connects and enroll in secondary school.²¹The benefits are often greatest for the most at-risk students, particularly English Language Learners.

• City Connects elementary school students achieve higher scores than their non–City Connects peers in reading and math on the Stanford Achievement Test version 9 (SAT-9).²² Effect sizes were large, between one quarter and half of a standard deviation. City Connects students also do better on other, noncognitive outcomes contributing to academic success: behavior, effort, and work habits.
• Students who had received City Connects support during elementary school were followed into middle school. On the Massachusetts statewide test, City Connects students closed two-thirds of achievement gaps on math and half of the achievement gap on English compared to their peers who did not receive City Connects.
• Although they have similar rates of chronic absenteeism in elementary school, where absenteeism is not a major problem, by middle and high school (where it is), City Connects students have significantly lower rates than their comparison peers.²³
• Students previously enrolled in City Connects are more likely to attend one of three of Boston’s selective public high schools (“exam schools”), with the odds of exam school attendance increasing for each year a student participated in City Connects.
• Students who participated in City Connects in kindergarten through fifth grade are less likely to be held back in a grade and are only about half as likely as comparison students to drop out of high school.
• More recent research has looked at the impacts of City Connects on vulnerable subgroups. It has been found to be especially beneficial to immigrant students and English Language Learners (Dearing, 2016). Reductions in high school drop-out rates were as strong, if not better, for black and Latino boys (see drop-out brief 2017).
• While the rate of referrals of students to special education services has not decreased, City Connects staff reports that, due to site coordinators’ improved understanding of individual students’ needs, the referrals are more accurate. This means that those students who are referred to special education evaluations are more likely to have a disability and actually need special education services, while schools are not paying for services for students who do not need them and would not benefit from them.

“City Connects provides the support and services that otherwise would be missing at our school. Without this program many of our students would be lost.” -Boston Catholic school principal

Successful, rigorous implementation has expanded work in Boston

• Based on promising data, district leaders enabled City Connects to launch a replication in eight additional schools in 2007. They provided critical support as funders weighed the evidence in funding decisions.
• When the district saw evidence of positive longitudinal outcomes in 2010, it not only asked for a further expansion to the newly identified Turnaround schools, but also agreed to contribute a portion of the costs. In 2014–15, City Connects was included as a line item for the first time in the Boston Public Schools budget.
• Currently, City Connects has a waiting list of schools seeking implementation if funds become available.
• Principals and teachers are highly satisfied with City Connects. A study of teachers’ experiences shows that City Connects improves their understanding of the whole child, helps them to feel more supported in their jobs, and improves their job satisfaction and understanding of students.²⁴ In an anonymous electronic survey, teachers report high levels of satisfaction with City Connects. For example, 97 percent of teachers surveyed in Boston Public Schools would recommend City Connects to a colleague.²⁵In both Boston and Springfield, 100 percent of principals reported that they were satisfied with City Connects and that improves their schools’ climate and said that they would recommend City Connects to a principal in another school. Perhaps most important, 86 percent of Boston and 100 percent of Springfield principals indicated that City Connects has improved their schools’ delivery of student support.²⁶

City Connects Has Expanded Across and Beyond Massachusetts

• Success in Boston led Springfield to seek City Connects as a turnaround strategy. During its first four years in Springfield, Mass., the district asked City Connects to expand from six to 13 schools. It has since further expanded, adding eight new schools in 2017-18 to bring the total to 23. Evidence of successful scaling is evident in measurements of fidelity of implementation of the model across program sites. For example, the 2014 Progress Report notes that:

Across the Springfield schools implementing City Connects, 91% of Springfield City Connects students received at least one service. Additionally, more than 80% of the students received three or more district- or community-provided services. These percentages …are similar to Boston, where 98% of students received at least one service and 81% received three or more services.17

• In Salem, Massachusetts, City Connects coordinators are in all eight of the district’s K-8 schools. In consultation with the local union, district leadership decided to repurpose existing school counselors and social workers to become trained as City Connects coordinators, since the City Connects counselor role is closely aligned with the professional standards for school counselors and social workers.
• Over time, City Connects has expanded beyond Boston and presently serves over 30,000 students in 12 cities across five states: Massachusetts, Connecticut, Minnesota, New York, and Ohio, with plans to expand as well to Indiana starting in fall 2018. (In 2016-17 City Connects connected 27,005 students to 212,319 services delivered by 1,249 unique providers.) Approximately one in five of those students speaks a language other than English at home, and over 90 percent are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. A sophisticated technology system allows for monitoring of fidelity of implementation, data driven continuous improvement, and outcome evaluation. Learning management systems are in use to support ongoing professional development, in addition to coaching and resources provided to support the City Connects practice at scale.

City Connects’ Success Has Begun to Influence Policy

Under cost assumptions most consistent with data on implementation, a report produced by Columbia University’s Center for Benefit-Cost Studies estimates the return on investment at 3:1, meaning society will save three dollars for every dollar it invests in the City Connects model. (That 3:1 includes the costs of all services – health care, social services, after school programs, etc. – for children and families.) If the costs to community partners are excluded, as they are in most benefit-cost analyses of comparable programs, the benefit-cost ratio is 11:1.²⁷ The success of City Connects has led to its use as an example of a comprehensive approach to education that can be scaled and adapted elsewhere, greatly enhancing its potential policy impact.

• In its 2015 Annual Report on the State of Education in the Commonwealth, the Rennie Center for Education Research and Policy pointed to City Connects as a scalable, evidence-based approach for a robust statewide approach to student support.²⁸ The report promoted investment in broader implementation of holistic assessments of student well-being, in addition to effective multi-provider models that allow schools and their partners to address a full range of student strengths.
• City Connects was recognized by Child Trends as one of three evidence-based approaches to addressing the out-of-school needs of students.²⁹ This Washington- based independent organization conducts research on issues impacting children and informs policymakers through meetings, briefs, and reports.

Evidence of City Connects’ impact and positive ROI have prompted momentum toward integrated student support broadly: a state senate vision document that includes integrating comprehensive supports; language and funding supporting ISS in the FY18 budget; a state commission that has incorporated and formally filed principles of effective practice for integrating student supports; legislation proposed by the Governor; and a new interagency working group. In addition, in his annual address to the House Chamber, the Speaker of the House recently made meeting students’ comprehensive needs a priority:

And once children reach school age, we similarly recognize the need to provide effective student supports that go beyond academia. But we also realize that our schools cannot do it alone. Therefore, we will build on our Safe and Supportive Schools initiative – created in the 2014 Gun Law – to help schools integrate student supports, leverage preexisting investments, and coordinate school and community-based resources.³⁰

Contact

Mary Walsh, Executive Director, [email protected], or visit www.cityconnects.org

Endnotes

1. Mark Melnik, “Demographic and Socio-Economic Trends in Boston: What we’ve learned from the latest Census data,” Boston Redevelopment Authority. Nov. 29, 2011. http://www.bostonplans.org/getattachment/70ddddcd-760f-49fa-a32e-fb5a80becd34.

2. As per cohort dropout rates for the 9^th-1th grade cohort from 1995-2000, https://www.bostonpublicschools.org/cms/lib/MA01906464/Centricity/Domain/238/Dropouts%20SY15%20complete.pdf.

3. City Connects, Story of our Growth. http://www.bc.edu/bc-web/schools/lsoe/sites/cityconnects/our-approach/story-of-our-growth.html

4. Citation can be the forthcoming 2018 Progress Report.

5. Data from SSIS are used in City Connects’ fidelity monitoring system. The system provides quantitative evidence of the degree to which the model has been implemented as designed. Data from the system also provide key evidence for outcome evaluation.

6. https://cityconnectsblog.org/2016/12/01/the-power-of-whole-class-reviews/#comments

7. M. E. Walsh, John T. Lee-St. John, A. Raczek, C. Foley, and E. Sibley, “The City Connects Early Childhood Model: Implementation and Results.” Poster submitted to the annual meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Philadelphia, PA, April 2015.

8. https://cityconnectsblog.org/2017/04/27/city-connects-in-early-education-settings/

9. Citation is the City Connects 2018 Progress Report, to appear in the next month.

10. City Connects Kappan article.

11. From anonymous teacher survey conducted by City Connects. Year?

12. Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, “Priority Partners for Turnaround” on Mass.gov

13. Kaiser Family Foundation, “Massachusetts Health Care Reform: Six Years Later.” May 2012.

14. It has since been up to the governor to implement the law. Almost 100 percent of children are covered by health insurance, and the focus now is to control the cost of healthcare, which has been increasing; originally 36 percent of the state budget in 2006, it was 43 percent in 2011.

15. Information from Elaine Weiss conversation with Mary Walsh, January 12, 2016.

16. M. E. Walsh, John T. Lee-St. John, A. Raczek, C. Foley, and E. Sibley, “The City Connects Early Childhood Model: Implementation and Results.” Poster submitted to the annual meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Philadelphia, PA, April 2015.

17. Separately, City Connects is in a couple of stand-alone early education and care centers and some of the children in those centers receive vouchers (state-federal CCDBG funding).

18. Tipping the Scales report. URL.

19. These include Administration and Finance, Housing and Economic Development, Labor and Workforce Development, Public Safety, and the Child Advocate.

20. All data points noted here are from the 2014 Progress Report unless otherwise indicated. The 2010 report compared Boston City Connects schools with 7 randomly selected comparison schools. The 2014 report compares all City Connects Boston to all non-City Connects Boston schools.

21. M.E. Walsh, G.F. Madaus, A.E. Raczek, E. Dearing, E., C. Foley, C. An, T.J. Lee-St. John, and A. Beaton, “A New Model for Student Support in High-poverty Urban Elementary Schools: Effects on Elementary and Middle School Academic Outcomes.” American Educational Research Journal, 51 (4), 704–737, July 7, 2014.

22. Based on 2001–2009 data, as reported in the 2012 progress report.

23. Because it is not a state standardized test, the SAT-9 is not subject to the “teaching to the test” nor other problems associated with trying to artificially inflate results. As City Connects notes, SAT-9 scores have been found to be strong predicators of high school graduation. As such, these data provide a useful comparison of meaningful improvement in academic outcomes that is likely the result of City Connects participation.

24. Sibley, E., Theodorakakis, M.A., Walsh, M.E., Foley, C., Petrie, J. & Raczek, A. (2017). The impact of comprehensive student support on teachers: Knowledge of the whole child, classroom practice, and teacher support. Teaching and Teacher Education 65, 145-156.

25. City Connects (2014), p. 41–44

26. City Connects (2014), p.40.

27. A. B. Bowden, C.R. Belfield, H.M. Levin, R. Shand, A. Wang, and M. Morales, A Benefit-Cost Study of City Connects, Center for Benefit-Cost Studies of Education, Columbia University, July 2015.

28. Rennie Center for Education Research & Policy, Achieving the Vision: Priority Actions for a Statewide Education Agenda, Boston, MA, Winter 2015.

29. K.A. Moore, S. Caal, R. Carney, L. Lippman, W. Li, K. Muenks, D. Murphey, D. Princiotta, A.N. Ramirez, A. Rojas, R. Ryberg, H. Schmitz, B. Stratford, and M.A. Terzian, Making the Grade: Assessing the Evidence for Integrated Student Supports, Child Trends. February 2014.

30. Speaker DeLeo’s 2017 Anniversary Address to the House Chamber setting forth his priorities for the coming session (January 30, 2018

Context/Need

In the late 1980s, Children’s Aid (formerly The Children’s Aid Society) worked with city planners to assess unmet needs in New York City neighborhoods. Through this process, the urban planners identified Washington Heights in northern Manhattan as the most underserved neighborhood in the city. Schools were vastly overcrowded, and social supports for children and families were greatly oversubscribed. The planners also identified a tremendous mismatch between the kinds of community resources available and the actual needs of the community, owing in large part to dramatic demographic shifts as the neighborhood became the port of entry for immigrants coming to New York City from the Dominican Republic and other Caribbean and Latin American countries. Subsequent meetings between Children’s Aid and the then-Board of Education revealed that the New York City School Construction Authority planned to build several new schools in Washington Heights. ¹ Rather than building multiservice community centers in Washington Heights, Children’s Aid decided to join forces with the school system to serve this high-need community with community schools.

In recent years, rising poverty, family breakups and removal to foster care, stress from immigration status, and homelessness have increased the share of children with major mental and emotional health issues. These manifest in schools primarily as student behavioral health challenges and difficulties with regulating emotions such as anxiety and depression. Almost half of the youth seen for mental health services have a primary diagnosis of anxiety or depression (45%). The marked increase in children presenting with these concerns can be seen both as a response to societal factors (high stakes academic testing, changes to immigration laws, increases in community violence) and increased familial stress in these communities (housing instability, food insecurity, domestic violence, parental substance use).

Response

In 1992, Children’s Aid formed a partnership with the New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE) to integrate a strong school curriculum with out-of-school enrichment programming, as well as child and family support services designed to remove barriers to s students’ learning and healthy development in area schools. According to C. Warren Moses, who served as the society’s associate executive director during this period:

The introduction of such a major change in the local schools and the dramatic expansion of activity in Washington Heights was a delicate process. Children’s Aid took time and great care to make sure residents, students, teachers, administrators, the teachers’ union, other social agencies, and elected officials, including the mayor and the governor, understood the concept, the implementation plan, and the organization’s commitment to services for the children and families of Washington Heights. ²

From an initial partnership school (Intermediate School 218) launched in March of 1992, the DOE-Children’s Aid collaboration grew over the following two decades to 16 community schools. A second growth spurt took place as a result of the City-sponsored expansion of community schools under Mayor Bill de Blasio, beginning in late 2014. Children’s Aid agreed to take on several additional schools as part of this expansion effort, which is managed by the new Office of Community Schools within the Department of Education. In addition, Children’s Aid’s National Center for Community Schools was invited to partner with the newly-established Office of Community Schools, to provide training, consultation, on-site coaching, and resource materials to all New York City community schools, which number more than 225 as of early 2018. Located in Washington Heights, East Harlem, the South Bronx and Staten Island, the Children’s Aid community schools include: ³

•  Manhattan: Mirabal Sisters Campus (IS 319 and IS 324); P.S. 152 Dyckman Valley; P.S. 5 Ellen Lurie; P.S. 50/I.S. 50 Vito Marcantonio; P.S. 8 Luis Belliard; and Salome Urena de Henriquez Campus (City College Academy of the Arts, IS 218, MS 322)
•  The Bronx: C. S. 61 The Francisco Oller Campus; Fannie Lou Hamer Middle School; Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School; C.S. 211 The Bilingual Magnet School; P.S. 301 Paul Dunbar Middle School; I.S. 318; X 458 Samara Community School; P.S. 314 Fairmount Neighborhood School; I.S. 219 New Venture School; Opportunity Charter School; Bronx Career and College Prep; Children’s Aid Society College Prep Charter School.
• Staten Island: Curtis High School

Strategy for Change: Children’s Aid Community Schools in New York City

The Children’s Aid community schools’ approach to school improvement is grounded in four overarching capacities. The first two of these illustrate the daily work of Children’s Aid, while the latter two help explain how the initiative has been able to scale up and its success in becoming increasingly self-sustaining. These four capacities include: (1) Collaboration: Children’s Aid works to ensure the involvement of a range of key stakeholders—educators, parents, students, funders, community members, service providers, and policymakers; (2) Comprehensiveness: Children’s Aid community schools respond to a wide spectrum of identified needs and work to boost students’ strengths by marshalling the full complement of partner resources; (3) Coherence: Children’s Aid invests financial and staff resources in programs intended to produce targeted results and coordinates and integrates systems of management; and (4) Commitment: from the start, Children’s Aid employs strategies geared toward making its efforts more sustainable.

Coalition/collaboration

In order to serve the range of student needs across its now-23 New York City schools, Children’s Aid has developed a number of partnerships, both public and private. These include city and state agencies, nonprofit organizations, health care providers, higher education institutions, private funders, and others, including businesses.

• Children’s Aid. As the lead agency, Children’s Aid directly provides a wide array of services and also engages other youth development, cultural, and health partners. Each school has a full-time community school director, a full-time program director, and a part-time education coordinator. Most schools also have a full-time parent coordinator. Children’s Aid is responsible for hiring and supervising these (and other) staff members, and it generates most of the resources that support their salaries and other program costs.
• New York City. In the community schools, Children’s Aid actively collaborates with several city agencies, including the departments of Education, Health, Mental Health, and Homeless Services; the Administration for Children’s Services; Human Resources Administration; and Youth and Community Development departments. As a result of the city-wide expansion, the Children’s Cabinet (an inter-agency council comprised of all City agencies that work with children) has greatly increased the outreach of governmental agencies working in community schools, particularly around immigration, homelessness, and mental health issues.
• New York State. The New York State Education Department and the Office of Children and Family Services provide funding and other supports for Children’s Aid work in its New York City community schools, through such programs as 21st Century Community Learning Centers, Advantage After-School, Extended-Day/Violence Prevention and the specific community school grants initiatives.
• Community. A number of community organizations work with Children’s Aid to provide supports for academic, social, and cultural enrichment (these include Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, American Ballet Theater, Boys and Girls Clubs of America, and the Developmental Studies Center/Center for the Collaborative Classroom); health (Columbia Presbyterian Hospital and Mount Sinai Medical Center); and others, such as Cornell University.

Luis A. Malavé, former principal of Intermediate School 218, observed regarding his partnership with Children’s Aid that:

We have a common mission and a clear sense that we have issues we have to tackle together…Our partnership makes the school much stronger than any one entity trying to do the work by itself. We often use the analogy of a marriage without the possibility of divorce, a long-term commitment that we must make work, whatever it takes, because it is best for children.⁴

Comprehensive supports

Children’s Aid community schools are open from early in the morning throughout the afternoon and often into the evening, as well as during weekends and over the summer, in order to provide a wide range of supports for students, their families, and their communities. These include:

• Early childhood education
  • In 1994, Children’s Aid piloted an early childhood program in two elementary schools in Washington Heights. The initiative, a partnership between NYCDOE and Children’s Aid, works with expectant families, newborns, and families with children up to age five. “The Zero to Five Program model connects two federally funded programs—Early Head Start and Head Start—to provide comprehensive educational and social services to low-income families and their children.”⁵
  • Children’s Aid also offers a variety of early childhood education programs in its other elementary-level community schools—an expansion that was fostered largely by increased city funding of early childhood programs, including the most recent expansion (2014-18).
• Health and Mental Health Services 

  

• For many years, Children’s Aid has operated five school-based health centers, which serve students in eight of its Washington Heights and Staten Island community schools. These health centers provide comprehensive care, including medical, dental, and mental health services. In 2017, Children’s Aid opened a sixth school-based health center in the Bronx.
• In addition, Children’s Aid uses a “school-linked” model in the Bronx, providing comprehensive health services at the centrally located Bronx Family Center, a Children’s Aid facility, for students in its Bronx community schools that are not served by the new school-based health center.
• Children’s Aid community schools that do not have school-based health centers are able to provide mental health services through Children’s Aid-employed social workers. The community school model allows for integration of physical and behavioral health supports. As such, behavioral health staff work closely with medical practitioners. Students who come to the clinic for reproductive health care, for example, are screened by medical providers on high-risk behaviors, and youth who present as at risk are seamlessly provided a “warm hand-off” to the behavioral health staff.⁶
• Families are involved in their children’s health care in a number of ways, as Beverly Colon, Children’s Aid’s former Director of Health Services, observed, “Family involvement begins at the time of enrollment in the [School Based Health Center], and year-round services and evening hours facilitate parents’ participation in their children’s care and preventive health education.” ⁷

Many children are trying to cope with stresses of poverty, family break-ups, high-stakes testing, and changes to immigration and other policies, through maladaptive strategies such as substance use, self- harm, or over eating. There has been increased reporting of suicidal thoughts and behaviors expressed by students, recently among younger students. Other students present with externalizing behaviors like attentional issues, oppositional defiant disorder, and violence or lashing out at others. For some, what is really a response to traumatic experiences can look to educators like attentional problems, hypervigilance may be seen as distractibility, triggered emotional dysregulation as anger, dissociation as apathy and withdrawal. Almost one in four students have parent-child conflicts, which weigh on students’ emotional wellbeing and interferes with academic functioning.

Bullying, particularly cyber-bullying, is another common driver of mental health problems. Youth who are struggling with identity, particularly L.G.B.T.Q. youth, are especially vulnerable. One student recently expressed suicidal thoughts after a family friend threatened to inform his fundamentalist father of his sexual orientation. The clinician provided a safety plan and worked with the family to ensure his safety. In another school, where a youth was being bullied for coming out, interventions includes anti-bullying groups, teacher trainings on supporting these students with, and building a culture of tolerance in the school community. A student presented last year in the Children’s Aid clinic with what seemed like psychotic symptoms. She had a traumatic history, including sexual and physical abuse and was in a foster care. This year, with trauma focused cognitive behavioral therapy and medication management, she is symptom free and has just been adopted.

• Expanded Learning Opportunities. All Children’s Aid community schools provide extensive after-school programs, and most also operate enrichment programs before school, on weekends and holidays, and over the summer. Children’s Aid staff work closely with teachers to ensure that these programs complement and enhance what students are learning during the regular school day, and each school hires a DOE staff member (a teacher or administrator) to serve as education coordinator and ensure that alignment. Programs strive to balance academics and other kinds of enrichment (social, cultural, and recreational) and to respond to the needs and interests of the participating students. While specific options vary from school to school, depending on demand, the range of activities includes:
  • Academics: Homework help, tutoring, book clubs, computer labs, STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) and other academic enrichment through the use of high-quality curricula such as KidzLit/KidzMath. ⁹
  • Sports: Basketball, swimming, volleyball, softball, soccer, track and field, martial arts, double-dutch jump rope, family fitness, and archery.
  • Arts programs: Visual arts, creative writing, music, dance, and theater.
  • Other offerings: Debate, chess, recreation (ping-pong  and pool), cooking, Recycle-a-bicycle, leadership clubs, mentoring, college and career preparation, and field trips.

    

  • Children’s Aid is a founding member of Boys & Girls Clubs of America (BGCA), and virtually every Children’s Aid site operates as a Boys & Girls Club. Many of the programs, clubs, and classes offered at Children’s Aid Society community schools use BGCA curricula, such as SMART Moves, Goals to Graduation, PASOS and Project Learn.
• Parent/Family Engagement. Children’s Aid Society community schools provide an extensive range of programs and services for parents and other family members.
  •  These include adult education classes, cultural events, immigration assistance, and programs to help parents support their children’s education.
  • Families can also access a wide array of support services, such as signing up for benefits (health insurance, Earned Income Tax Credit) and receiving financial assistance through Children’s Aid’s participation in The New York Times Neediest fund drive.
  •  Most Children’s Aid community schools have worked with their school partners to designate a physical space in the building for a Family Resource Center, described by Hersilia Mendez, former director of marketing and external affairs for the Children’s Aid National Center for Community Schools as a magnetic, welcoming space with an open-door policy. It is staffed by the parent coordinator and available year-round all day and through the evening for parent interaction, training and services.¹⁰

Policy Foundations and Implications

The longevity and success of the Children’s Aid community schools can be attributed both to intentional practices and strategies—some established from the start, others that have evolved with its expansion —and to specific local, state, and federal policies that support the initiative.

Federal, state, and city policy support

Policies and funding streams that support the development of the “whole child” are more supportive than those that take a narrow view of children’s learning.

•  A good example of this kind of enlightened and supportive public policy at the federal level is the 21st Century Community Learning Centers section of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), which explicitly focuses on “positive youth development” and “enrichment,” and encourages potential grantees to pay attention to multiple domains of young people’s development, including social, emotional, and physical development in addition to the cognitive aspects. The latest (December 2015) reauthorization of ESEA—the Every Student Succeeds Act—has taken a more holistic view of education than its predecessor, and offers specific provisions for community schools at the federal level while also requiring states to propose “non-academic” indicators of student success.
• Similarly, New York State’s support of school-based health centers, after-school programs, and community schools recognizes the inextricable links among the multiple domains of student learning and development. New York State has led the nation in its explicit funding for community schools—providing more than $150 million for community schools through state foundation aid to low-income school districts in FY 2018 alone.

At the city level, Mayor de Blasio has far exceeded (more than doubled) his 2014 campaign promise to increase by 100 the number of community schools in New York City during his first term, making the New York City community schools initiative the largest in the country. This expansion effort was made possible by the investment of substantial New York City tax levy dollars as well as by braiding available the kinds of state and federal dollars outlined above.

Children’s Aid has benefitted from all of these funding streams, and has also provided as a long-term sustainability model, demonstrating how community schools can blend categorical funding into a comprehensive and holistic approach, using diverse resources (public and private, education and non-education, human and financial).

Coherence

Joint planning, a key component of the community schools strategy, begins when Children’s Aid and a school’s administration decide to join forces and continues as members of the Children’s Aid community schools staff are fully integrated into each school’s Leadership Team, School Safety Committee, Pupil Personnel Team and other governance, planning, and decision-making bodies. Most schools also hold annual planning retreats that involve DOE and Children’s Aid staff.

The same attention to coherence and relationships is evident initiative-wide. Early on, Children’s Aid organized, at the central level, a quality assurance infrastructure that included regular principals’ dinners that brought together Children’s Aid and DOE leadership; monthly work group meetings for groups serving similar roles within the Children’s Aid team (community school directors, program directors, parent coordinators) focused on professional development and group problem-solving; and an Annual Summer Institute for Directors designed to provide an intensive professional-development and planning opportunity. ¹¹

Commitment

The Children’s Aid board made a significant initial commitment to its community schools that has continued over the past 25-plus years. Each year, Children’s Aid raises and/or allocates several million dollars in support of its school-based work. This long-term commitment provides the initiative stability that would otherwise not be possible. As described in more detail below, public dollars from a variety of sources provide two-thirds of the funding for the additional supports and services, and private dollars provide the remaining one-third.

A commitment to measuring results and to continuous improvement

From the outset, Children’s Aid has commissioned a variety of third-party evaluations to assess the results of its work. These results have been used for continuous improvement in a variety of ways, such as strengthening communication and partnerships with teachers, and for advocacy purposes.

• Around 2000, Children’s Aid contracted with CitySpan, a West Coast technology company, to customize its Youthservices.net software for Children’s Aid Society community schools. Many organizations use this software to track participation in after-school programs but Children’s Aid wanted to track and enable analysis of the many other services and programs it provides as well as a full-service initiative. Data from this system supports both continuous improvement efforts and external evaluations.
• In addition, Children’s Aid commissioned the Finance Project to conduct a Social Return on Investment study of its community schools. This study focused on the two initial Children’s Aid community schools—Intermediate School 218 and P.S. 5 (Ellen Lurie School)—which had the most robust long-term results.¹²(Highlights of these evaluations and others are listed among the “indicators of progress” below.)

Collaborating on an advocacy agenda

Children’s Aid was one of the three founding members of the Coalition for Community Schools, a national organization established to advance federal policies that support community schools. As an active member of the coalition since its inception in 1997, Children’s Aid participates in federal, state, and local advocacy activities through the national coalition and through other collective efforts including the New York State After School Network, the national After School Alliance, the New York City Campaign for Children (which played a major role in Mayor de Blasio’s investments in and expansion of community schools), and the national and state Alliances for School-Based Health Care. Recently Children’s Aid took the lead, working with an array of key partners, in developing the New York State Community Schools Network.

All of this work enables Children’s Aid to collaborate with other like-minded organizations to foster the development of evidence-based public and social policies that respond to the documented needs of students and their families. Examples of such policies and resulting programs are the Federal Full-Service Community Schools discretionary grants program; the 21st Century Community Learning Centers program; and the New York State Community Schools grants and aid programs.

Sharing Children’s Aid results and expertise nationally and internationally

Recognizing the importance of scaling up the Children’s Aid community school strategy in other districts and states, Children’s Aid founded the National Center for Community Schools in 1994 to respond to growing demand for information and advice about community schools implementation.

• The Center has worked with community school initiatives in over 80 cities across the United States and has hosted visitors from 75 other countries who have come to New York City to learn about the community schools strategy and see schools in action. The NCCS staff team has assisted most of the country’s major community schools initiatives with their initial and scaling efforts, including: Albuquerque, Baltimore, Buffalo, Chicago, Cincinnati, Detroit, Flint, Hartford, Oakland, Portland (OR) and San Francisco.
•  The Center’s services—study visits, training, consultation, strategic planning advice, and written and electronic tools—have contributed to the development of over 17,000 community school adaptations across the United States and abroad, the large majority of them in the United Kingdom – England as well as Wales and Northern Ireland.
• In addition, it has published a variety of implementation guides, including a widely disseminated manual entitled Building Community Schools: A Guide for Action. ¹³

Funding

Children’s Aid leverages a variety of public and private funding streams to underwrite the range of supports it offers, and it will continue to need to creatively identify new ones as the reach of community schools expands in New York City.

Public

It is hard to separate funding streams/sources into federal, state, and local channels since many of them are a combination (for example, Medicaid originates at the federal level but is administered by the state, and 21st Century funds originate in the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act but get administered by the state). Public sources that come from all three levels thus include Medicaid and Child Health Plus for medical and mental health services; federal Early Head Start, NYC Early Learn, and the pre-K expansion for early childhood programs; and 21st Century Community Learning Centers, New York State Advantage and Extended-Day/Violence Prevention programs, and the New York City Out-of-School Time initiative for after-school and summer enrichment programs.

Private sources

Private sources include a number of national and local foundations, corporations and individuals. Some of the foundation supporters direct their grants to a specific program or school within the comprehensive, multi-site framework of Children’s Aid’s community schools. Major support for the work includes the Charina Endowment Fund, the Charles Hayden Foundation, Morgan Stanley, and the Teagle Foundation (directed toward the college access program at Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School).

Children’s Aid attributes its success in raising both public and private dollars to a combination of several things: solid infrastructure (public and private fundraising staffs); a program staff that partners actively with development staff; prior history and track record not only of raising money but of delivering results; good relationships with funders, public and private; and history of providing comprehensive services, which allows it to generate resources from multiple funding streams (e.g., Medicaid). As well, consistent investments in evaluation and have results has helped us sustain the work. Jane Quinn, director of the Center for Community Schools, says of Children’s Aid’s work, “I believe we are a ‘proof point’ that there are major public dollars out there that can be redirected toward community schools work.”

Indicators of Progress

Evaluations

Evaluations find both academic and other gains for Children’s Aid students and their teachers, affirming the benefits of high-quality services that students receive as a matter of course at their schools:

• A recent longitudinal evaluation found positive long-term effects of participation in the Children’s Aid Zero to Five program. The researchers compared third, fourth, and fifth grade standardized test scores in math and English Language Arts of children who participated in the program with the scores of similar students who had not participated. Children’s Aid participants outperformed their peers 97 percent of the time, demonstrating a substantial long-term positive effect. ¹⁴
• A 2004–2007 evaluation conducted by ActKnowledge found that middle school students who participated in Children’s Aid after-school programs experienced greater academic gains than their non-participating peers. This evaluation also found that more participation led to higher achievement gains in math and reading test scores and school attendance, and to a teacher-reported increase in students’ motivation to learn. ¹⁵
•  A 2009 ActKnowledge evaluation, conducted just after the NYC Department of Education began comparing individual schools’ progress with that of all city schools and with peer schools, found that Children’s Aid Society community schools averaged greater student achievement gains than other schools. It also found that the community schools had “far higher” attendance than peer schools, and that schools with on-site health centers tended to have higher attendance than those without centers.
• Parents are more engaged in community schools than in others. Fordham University researchers report that among the most significant findings of their six-year study were dramatic differences in parental involvement, specifically: “Parents were more involved, took more responsibility for their children’s school work, felt more welcome within the school and were observed to be a greater presence in the community schools than in comparison schools. Parents also took advantage of the many services offered to them, such as social services and adult education workshops.” ¹⁶
• Teachers, too, benefit from Children’s Aid. Early Fordham University studies found teacher attendance to be higher at community schools than at comparison schools. This saves schools money by reducing the number of substitutes they need to hire and reduces disruption for students. As well, teachers in community schools reported being able to spend more time on instruction —including class preparation and working directly with children—than their counterparts in comparison schools. ¹⁷

These multiple gains produce valuable public returns. A Finance Project Social-Return-on- Investment study documented a 10.3:1 ratio at the elementary level and a 14.8:1 ratio at the intermediate school level., i.e., every dollar invested in elementary schools delivered over $10 in social value, and every dollar invested in middle schools delivered nearly $15 in social value. ¹⁸

Children’s Aid community schools have also gained traction in scaling up and asserting policy influence

• Collaborative advocacy efforts with allies have led, among other things, to the establishment of the federal Full-Service Community Schools discretionary grants program, the 21st Century Community Learning Centers program, and the New York State Community Schools grants and aid programs.
• In November 2013, Children’s Aid won a $3 million federal Investing in Innovation (i3) grant from the U.S. Department of Education to create a Parent Leadership Institute in the South Bronx, modeled on its successful one in Washington Heights. ¹⁹
• In February 2014, Children’s Aid Society President and CEO Richard Buery, Jr., was named deputy mayor for strategic policy initiatives. In that capacity, Buery led New York City’s work to expand early childhood education, after-school programs, and community schools, and to establish a Children’s Cabinet, during Mayor Bill de Blasio’s first term.²⁰
• In June 2014, Mayor de Blasio announced an initial plan to honor one of his signature campaign promises—to expand by 100 the number of community schools in New York City.²¹ At that time, he announced $52 million in funding for the first 40 of them,²² and in August, three Children’s Aid community school leaders (two principals and one Children’s Aid staff member) were appointed to serve as members of the NYC Community Schools Advisory Board. Jane Quinn, Children’s Aid’s Vice President for Community Schools, says that

The influence of the Children’s Aid community schools implementation experience on this recent expansion cannot be over-estimated. Both the Executive Director and Deputy Director of the NYCDOE’s newly established Office of Community Schools—Chris Caruso and Sarah Jonas—worked in Children’s Aid community schools earlier in their careers. Children’s Aid partnered with the New School in preparing a background paper for the New York City Mayor’s Office on ‘going to scale’ with community schools in New York City, based on the experience of five other cities [that Children’s Aid’s National Center for Community Schools had assisted]. And many of Children’s Aid’s conceptual frameworks—around stages of development of community schools, core capacities and systems-building approaches—have been adapted by the Office of Community Schools. ²³

Contact

Jane Quinn, [email protected], More information on Children’s Aid Community Schools is available at childrensaidNYC.org and at www.nccs.org.

Endnotes

1. That body is now the NYC Department of Education.

2. C. Warren Moses, “History of the Children’s Aid Society Model,” in Community Schools in Action: Lessons from a Decade of Practice, Joy G. Dryfoos, Jane Quinn, and Carol Barkin, eds., New York: Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 16.

3. The Children’s Aid Society, “NYC Locations.”

4. Luis A. Malavé, “The Power of Two or More: Partnership from a School Administrator’s Perspective,” in Community Schools in Action: Lessons from a Decade of Practice, Joy G. Dryfoos, Jane Quinn, and Carol Barkin, eds., New York: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. 129-30.

5. Andrew Seltzer, “Early Childhood Programs,” Community Schools in Action: Lessons from a Decade of Practice, Joy G. Dryfoos, Jane Quinn, and Carol Barkin, eds., New York: Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 73.

6. Elaine Weiss correspondence with Aaron Newman, March 2018.

7. Beverly A. Colon, “School-Based Health Services,” Community Schools in Action: Lessons from a Decade of Practice, Joy G. Dryfoos, Jane Quinn, and Carol Barkin, eds., New York: Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 85.

8. Ibid.

9. Center for the Collaborative Classroom, “AfterSchool KidzLit.”

10. Hersilia Méndez, “Parent Involvement and Leadership in Action,” Community Schools in Action: Lessons from a Decade of Practice, Joy G. Dryfoos, Jane Quinn, and Carol Barkin, eds., New York: Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 42.

11.Coalition for Community Schools CAS NYC one-pager.

12. Jane Quinn notes that the outcomes from these schools are “not necessarily the best, but [they provide] the most number of years–hence, the most longitudinal data, which allowed the researchers to make the best SROI predictions.” Elaine Weiss correspondence with Jane Quinn, Jan. 2018.

13. National Center for Community Schools, Building Community Schools: A Guide for Action, New York: The Children’s Aid Society, 2011.

14. Margaret Caspe and Joy Lorenzo Kennedy, Sustained Success: The Long-Term Benefits of High Quality Early Childhood Education, New York: The Children’s Aid Society, June, 2014.

15. “CAS Community Schools: Results to Date” in Building Community Schools: A Guide for Action, The Children’s Aid Society, 2011, pp. 28-31.

16. Ellen Brickman, Anthony Cancelli, Arturo Sanchez, and Glenda Rivera, The Children’s Aid Society/ Board of Education Community Schools Third-Year Evaluation Report, New York: Fordham University Graduate School of Education and Fordham University Graduate School of Social Services, 1999.

17. “CAS Community Schools: Results to Date” in Building Community Schools: A Guide for Action, The Children’s Aid Society, 2011, pp. 28-31.

18. Laura Martinez and Cheryl D. Hayes, Measuring Social Return on Investment for Community Schools: A Case Study, Washington, DC: The Finance Project, 2013.

19. “As explained in CAS’s project summary, “CAS proposes to bring the full set of parent engagement strategies piloted in one highly distressed NYC community … to another… to verify whether inschool parent resource centers – with parent coordinators trained in utilizing a specific set of parent communication, outreach, and organizing strategies, and adult education classes and leadership institutes – lead to increases in student achievement.” From Michele NcNeil, “25 New i3 Winners to Split $135 Million,” Politics K-12 (Education Week blog), November 8, 2013.

20. http://www.childrensaidsociety.org/news/2014/president-ceo-richard-r-buery-jr-departs-become- deputy-mayor 

21. Peter Svab, “Bill de Blasio’s Community School Plan Will Need a Lot of Love to Succeed,” Epoch Times, February 20, 2014.

22. “To be eligible schools must be struggling with student attendance, Deputy Mayor Richard Buery said after a press conference Tuesday. The city will use a state education grant to supply each school with at least $300,000 annually for four years, depending on its size and needs, Buery said.” From Patrick Wall, “City Launches $52 Million Plan to Turn 40 Schools into Service Hubs,” Chalkbeat New York.

23. Elaine Weiss correspondence with Jane Quinn, April 2018.

In 2008, Durham community leaders identified East Durham as one of the city’s most distressed areas, based on a community risk assessment conducted by Duke University’s Children’s Environmental Health Initiative.¹ A 120-block area of East Durham was selected as a target area for support. As of 2015, nearly 4,000 of the nearly 11,000 residents living in this target area are children and youth, over 1,000 of them under the age of five. Two thirds of East Durham residents are African American and over twenty percent are Hispanic. Key indicators of distress for residents include a 46 percent poverty rate, high rates of unemployment and crime, and a homeownership rate of just 23 percent.²  Children living in the neighborhood are at elevated risk of school and life failure due to lack of access to high-quality childcare and high rates of low birth-weight births, child maltreatment, childhood obesity, exposure to lead in their homes, teen pregnancy, and disconnected youth. ³

The six neighborhood and public charter schools are historically among those with the lowest average test scores in Durham. (Two, Neal Middle School and Southern High School, are located outside of the neighborhood but serve Zone kids.) At Y.E. Smith Elementary School, 95 percent of the students are black or Hispanic, and virtually all qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. Approximately half of Y.E. Smith students enter kindergarten with no formal childcare or pre-K experiences. In 2016-2017, only 18 percent of third-graders at Eastway Elementary and 29% of Y.E. Smith Elementary were reading at or above grade level based on North Carolina End-Of-Grade Tests. ⁴

Response

Inspired by Paul Tough’s book, Whatever it Takes, which documents Geoffrey Canada’s development of the Harlem Children’s Zone, community leaders in Durham were determined to implement a similar strategy in East Durham. Following a succession of planning activities, community conversations, seed grants, steering committee meetings, and exploratory site visits, including a visit to Harlem, the East Durham Children’s Initiative (EDCI) was launched in 2009. The combination of widespread community engagement and targeted outreach to key stakeholders and leaders made this a powerful effort.

From 2009 to 2011, EDCI enhanced its operational capacity by joining the Center for Child and Family Health, bringing together a strong leadership team and staff, building relationships with community members and donors, partnering with local organizations, and piloting several promising initiatives through early fundraising efforts. In 2012, EDCI became a private, 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization and moved its offices to the 1.2 square-mile target EDCI Zone.

One of the most important community forums was a ‘kitchen table’ conversation in October 2009, attended by over 100 residents and community leaders. Community members spent time in small groups discussing a range of issues. The concerns, hopes and possible solutions presented at this and other planning meetings formed the basis for EDCI’s initial programming. — East Durham Children’s Initiative’s “About” web page

Strategy for Change

Like the Harlem Children’s Zone, the East Durham Children’s Initiative is a place-based initiative that focuses on providing a pipeline of high-quality cradle-to-college-or-career services for some of Durham’s most vulnerable children and families. This long-term, targeted approach helps EDCI understand specific community needs and assets, as well as build strong relationships with East Durham residents and partners. EDCI’s long-term vision is to ensure that all children in the EDCI Zone successfully graduate from high school, ready for college or career.

Intentionally distinct from the Harlem model, however, EDCI’s early leadership team decided not to offer its own charter school, but rather to work with the existing public schools. EDCI President and CEO David Reese explains, “We’re a public-school model, which allows us to serve any child regardless of whether the adult in their life is savvy enough to navigate all of the educational opportunities available to children .” ⁵  With only a small fraction of the funding enjoyed by HCZ, in general EDCI has focused mainly on leveraging and aligning existing programs and resources rather than creating new ones.  In its first five years, EDCI focused its efforts on children’s early years, from birth to fifth grade, based on the understanding that setting a strong developmental and learning foundation enables subsequent success. As the initiative has grown, EDCI has progressed into middle school and is expected to expand to high school and beyond.

EDCI’s continuum of two-generation services, starting with families that are expecting or have just given birth to a child, is designed to fill gaps in existing services and to mitigate barriers that limit children’s success in school and in life more broadly. Specifically, EDCI aims to achieve six interconnected goals: children are healthy and ready to learn, children are prepared for kindergarten, parents and caregivers are actively engaged in their children’s educational success, students are academically proficient, students successfully graduate from high school, college and career ready, and the EDCI Zone is a safe, healthy and economically thriving community. ⁶  EDCI uses a coordinated and holistic approach to address a range of needs using high-quality interventions that target both individual and environmental factors (e.g., child, family, school, and community). Wraparound programming includes early childhood home-visiting services, support for childcare and preschool access, summer camps, tutoring, parent engagement efforts, health initiatives, and community-building activities. Notes David Reese, President and CEO of the East Durham Children’s Initiative,

Our mission is to create a pipeline of services that start from the time a child is born and expand all the way until we have children who are college or career ready.

Coalition

Partnerships and collaboration are critical to the success of EDCI, which actively partners with over 50 organizations and service providers to build its pipeline of quality services for targeted children and families living in the EDCI Zone or attending EDCI target schools.⁷  EDCI is led by President and CEO David Reese, who is supported by a board of directors as well as by five committees that take the lead on governance, finance, development, administration, and programs. Pipeline partners include:

• Durham Public Schools: EDCI targets students in two neighborhood public elementary schools, one public middle school, and two public charter schools serving Zone kids. The initiative is also actively considering strategies that support EDCI Zone students attending non-Zone schools to help ensure continuity of services.

  

• Public agencies: In addition to Durham Public Schools, which is its most important partner, EDCI works closely with the Durham County Department of Public Health, Durham County Public Library, Durham County Social Services, Durham Parks and Recreation, and the City of Durham.
• Nonprofit organizations and other community service providers working in areas such as early childhood, literacy, health and wellness, arts and culture, youth empowerment, family engagement, and economic development: Some of EDCI’s nonprofit pipeline partners include: Book Harvest, Center for Child and Family Health, Child Care Services Association, Diaper Bank of NC, Dress for Success, Durham Literacy Center, Durham’s Partnership for Children, Durham Together for Resilient Youth, Durham YMCA, Habitat for Humanity of Durham, The Hill Center, Kidznotes, Latino Educational Achievement Partnership, Museum of Life and Science, Partners for Youth Opportunity, Rotary Club of Durham, Student U, and Village of Wisdom. In 2015, EDCI added a Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math (STEAM) program, which is supported by over a dozen over a dozen other public and private enrichment partners, including environmental organizations and museums.
• Institutions of Higher Education: Duke’s Center for Child and Family Policy, Duke Health, Duke’s Office of Durham and Regional Affairs, the Nasher Museum of Art, Sarah P. Duke Gardens, NC State University, and Durham Technical Community College.

Comprehensive Services

With the goal of supporting at-risk children and their families in East Durham from birth through college and/or career, EDCI’s pipeline of services includes a variety of supports associated with positive child, family and community outcomes:

Early Childhood Services

To get all children to kindergarten ready to learn, EDCI enhances both in-home and paid care experiences for young children and their families.

• Parent education and early learning opportunities that support kindergarten readiness are key target areas for EDCI. Zone families with children ages 0–3 begin receiving services through a home-visiting nurse program called Durham Connects, followed by weekly to biweekly in-home parent education and support provided by Healthy Families Durham/Jumpstart and the EDCI Early Childhood Parent Advocate Program. Parent Advocates fill in the gaps by providing support to disconnected families through home visits and other strategies that promote early literacy, family involvement, and connections to community resources such as the state’s prekindergarten program, NC Pre-K. Staff members are trained in evidence-based models of family support including Touchpoints and Triple P.

• 

  Improved access to high-quality childcare and preschool are supported through strong partnerships with Durham County Social Services, Child Care Services Association, and other community agencies. These collaborations enable EDCI Zone families to receive priority for childcare subsidies and scholarships. In 2015, EDCI partnered with the Latino Educational Achievement Partnership (LEAP) to open a new half-day, bilingual preschool called EDCI LEAP Academy for 30 three- and four-year-old Zone children who would not otherwise have access to preschool.

• Transition to kindergarten: Community-based story hours (including monthly story hours in Spanish to promote literacy among native Spanish-speaking children and their caregivers), parent groups, a summer kindergarten readiness program, and transition to kindergarten events at neighborhood schools are offered in collaboration with partners including Durham’s Partnership for Children, Duke’s Office of Durham and Regional Affairs, and the Durham Public Library.

Family Engagement

Parent engagement from their children’s birth through those students’ high school years is a critical component to supporting children’s academic success.

• ECI’s Early Childhood and School Age Parent Advocates are highly trained staff members whose primary role is to support family engagement in their child’s education by getting to know parents in their homes or at other convenient locations, assessing family needs and strengths, facilitating supportive home environments, and helping parents learn about and connect to beneficial school and community resources. Community-based workshops are provided by the advocates throughout the school year in areas of interest identified by parents. Advocates also help leverage other EDCI services by encouraging family involvement in the pipeline.
• In 2017, EDCI’s Parent Advocate team included four Advocates working with parents and caregivers of children and youth attending target elementary and middle schools, as well as three who support families with young children in the Zone. Several staff are bilingual in English and Spanish to ensure that all parents can get the support they need. Their ultimate goal is to help empower parents to be strong advocates for their children, throughout early childhood and their school careers.

Out-of-School Learning Opportunities

EDCI and its partners provide a number of high-quality learning experiences for EDCI Zone children and youth during afterschool hours and summer months. ⁸ These programs are geared towards providing academic enrichment and preventing summer learning loss.

• Since 2010, EDCI has been offering summer camp opportunities for free or minimal cost to EDCI Zone students in collaboration with partners. In 2017, EDCI successfully connected students to three camps including EDCI BELL Summer Camp, EDCI STEAM Summer Camp, and the YMCA’s Camp High Hopes. Several community partners also offer additional camp scholarships to Zone students.

  

• In 2016, EDCI launched its first weekend program for elementary school students called EDCI STEAM Saturdays. ⁹ With the support of various enrichment partners, including the Museum of Life and Science, the Nasher Museum, BOOST, Triangle Land Conservancy, and others, students are engaged in a morning of STEAM-related activities (e.g., robotics, food science, coding) as well as field trips offered in six-week sessions throughout the school year.
• EDCI staff actively refer Zone students to additional afterschool opportunities provided by partners in the community such as Durham Public Schools Community Education, Kidznotes, Girl Scouts, Boys and Girls Club of Durham and Orange County, Salvation Army, SEEDS, and Student U.

“EDCI Summer Camp was an opportunity to keep my daughter involved socially and academically. The resource was affordable, and I was able to give my daughter something fun and productive to do for most of the summer.”– Shaqueta Boone, parent of EDCI camper ¹⁰

Literacy and Academic Enrichment

In addition to out-of-school programs, EDCI supplements literacy efforts at target schools in several ways:

• EDCI partners with other organizations to provide some in-school, literacy supports that supplement school activities such as intensive small group tutoring (HillRAP) provided by The Hill Center, and a volunteer reading buddy initiative (Reading Rangers) implemented by the Rotary Club of Durham with school staff.
• Hundreds of new and used books are distributed to children and families through schools, community events, and little libraries located throughout the neighborhood. All students at Eastway and Y.E. Smith Elementary Schools in the Zone receive ten free books to take home and read over the summer through Book Harvest’s Books on Break Program.

Health and Wellness

EDCI knows that children who are healthy and food secure, and whose families are informed about healthy shopping, eating, and living are more likely to be engaged and ready to learn at school.

• EDCI supports children at risk for hunger through the Back Pack Buddies program during the school year, and through the EDCI Summer Lunch program when school is out. ¹¹
• In 2016, EDCI launched a new health and leadership program for 60 fourth and fifth grade students called the Youth Leadership Council.¹²  This unique program empowers students to develop leadership skills, adopt healthier lifestyles, and reinvest in their community by creating solutions for EDCI Zone health challenges. Student projects have included a school-wide walkathon, a community field day, and monthly mobile farmers markets for food-insecure families.
• Additional community-based efforts include free Zumba classes, cooking demonstrations, walking groups, distribution of children’s bicycles, and partnerships with local farmers markets.¹³

College and Career Preparation

EDCI views this goal as requiring a long-time approach and laying early foundations.

• The initiative’s primary focus in its first five years of implementation was to establish its early childhood and elementary school services and expand the pipeline to middle and high school students as children age.
• In fall 2015, EDCI hired and embedded a Middle School Youth Advocate at Neal Magnet Middle School, whose responsibilities include providing in-class support for students, hosting a twice-weekly afterschool program, and referring families to programs and services. In fall 2017, EDCI created a Middle School Family Advocate position to provide additional support to the Youth Advocate and to parents of middle school students. In addition, EDCI leverages community resources and partnerships by actively referring Zone students to local youth-serving organizations such as Student U and Partners for Youth Opportunity.
• Future EDCI youth program expansion will include adolescent health supports, mentoring, SAT preparation, college tours, leadership training, and career exploration opportunities. EDCI Director of Program Planning and Partner Engagement Mary Mathew says that these programs will be built out over the next five years.

Community Engagement

EDCI’s Program Implementation and Community Engagement team members actively participate in EDCI service delivery and promotion, as well as neighborhood groups and events to help foster relationships in the community.

• EDCI builds and strengthens its community involvement through the EDCI Parent and Community Advisory Council (PCAC). This group consists of parents and caregivers who are actively involved in EDCI and meets several times a year to discuss identified areas for community input.
• EDCI staff regularly attend community meetings and, when appropriate, facilitate communication and collaboration on the issues impacting development and families in the Zone.

Funding

To secure program and operational revenue, EDCI implements a comprehensive annual fund development plan. (By fiscal year 2016, the initiative’s budget had grown to $2.3 million,) This does not include additional investment by EDCI partner organizations in the Zone. Funding sources include individuals, corporations, and private foundations.

At present, EDCI does not seek public funding, whether municipal, state, or federal. (It does receive a small amount of municipal support for a community lunch program for adults and children.) It is the belief of EDCI leaders that public funding typically requires a greater degree of staff support and less flexibility in making programmatic adjustments. To date, EDCI’s fund development strategy has allowed it to rely on private revenue sources to support its programs, a strategy that “ensures that EDCI can meet the needs of the children and families it serves in an innovative and nimble way.”

EDCI also believes that encouraging its partners to seek joint funding, and to use EDCI’s “brand” to do so, delivers a win-win: many of these organizations cite challenges to fundraising as their biggest barrier to success, so being able to work with a respected partner that draws from diverse funding sources advances their work as well. Collaboration with EDCI also opens up funding opportunities – such as specific federal grants – for which the local organizations might not otherwise have been eligible.

EDCI programming is supported through the generosity of private foundations, corporations, and individual donors in the community. We are grateful for the ongoing commitment these partners have made to support the success of EDCI kids and families. —Lauren Stephenson, EDCI Development Manager ¹⁴

Foundational Practices and Policies

The East Durham Children’s Initiative can trace much of its success in supporting students, expanding, and making progress toward the goal of becoming self-sustaining to specific practices and policies, both internal to the initiative and based at the state and local level.

Community Engagement and Coordination

Along with its challenges, the community also boasts many assets that support its vitality, including resident-led groups and activities, local businesses, faith-based organizations, historic housing and building redevelopment, investments from city and county agencies, and engaged children and families. EDCI works closely with families and other community members to achieve its goals. This allows for a more sustainable and replicable approach and ensures programs are tailored to specific community needs. EDCI believes that a cadre of high-quality providers with multiple, coordinated interventions provide a more stable base for positive community outcomes than a top-down, one-provider system. This model also capitalizes on existing expertise and evidence-based practices already established by Durham organizations to maximize resources and reduce service duplication.

One key indication of EDCI’s commitment to meaningful community engagement is its move in 2012 from downtown Durham, where it was originally located, to the Shepherd’s House United Methodist Church in East Durham, close to Y.E. Smith Elementary School, making it much more accessible to members of the community. In 2018, EDCI will move to its permanent home in another renovated church building in the neighborhood. The EDCI Community Engagement Team actively engages with children, families, and community groups in the Zone to facilitate involvement in the pipeline. EDCI also uses information from its Parent and Community Advisory Council and parent surveys to shape programming; Zumba classes with free child care and the establishment of the EDCI LEAP Academy are two examples.

Data- and Information-Collection, Use, and Sharing

EDCI actively works to increase connections among Zone families, schools, and partners, and to design processes for accountability and shared data collection. It convenes regular meetings of both small and large groups to highlight partner work, share information, seek feedback, and pursue joint grant-writing opportunities. The leadership team and board members actively work to establish relationships with other local, state, and national organizations interested in funding or collaborating with EDCI. This approach of building on existing resources lends itself to replication not only in other Durham neighborhoods, but in cities across the country.

The initiative also has made the collection of data and its independent analysis a core practice. From its inception, EDCI has partnered with the Duke Center for Child and Family Policy at Duke University to evaluate its core programs. This partnership, the data generated, and the analysis of it, inform EDCI’s work and help guide ongoing changes to its strategy in order to improve outcomes for the children and families it serves. Partners also collect key implementation data, such as the number of parents served by their programs and outcome data like parent engagement, kindergarten readiness, and literacy. The Center has been able to collect only limited student-level data from school in its first few years working with EDCI but hopes that it will encounter fewer challenges going forward and be able to obtain more consistent data on attendance, discipline, and academic proficiency. It currently has access to data for students whose parents consented to have it collected available in a statewide database for public school students that is housed at the NC Education Research Data Center at Duke University.

Sharing evaluations with partners advances accountability: it enables EDCI to ensure that partnerships it develops make sense and to help partners improve the services they provide. The data have been used to enhance programs, like recruiting more parents to sign their children up for summer camp, and EDCI Advocates can access the data to help better connect families with targeted community resources. The evaluation team has also identified a comparable Durham neighborhood, with the goal of using that baseline to assess the community-level impacts of EDCI on the Zone in the future.

Center for Child and Family Policy researchers are laying the foundation for a rigorous longitudinal evaluation of the long-term impact EDCI has on child well-being, education, and community-level outcomes. In the interim, the goal of CCFP’s evaluation is to assess if EDCI core programs are implemented as planned and achieve their intended results. EDCI Impact Summary, Year 6, p.1

Policies

A variety of district, state, and federal policies affect EDCI’s work and the success of East Durham children and families.

• For example, EDCI families benefit from policies that enhance access to childcare subsidies, early learning opportunities and school breakfast and lunch programs. Because it sees every day the range of factors that affect Zone families’ lives, EDCI also understands the benefits of policies that promote supports for immigrant families, children’s and adult’s mental health, and economic opportunity and security for families (e.g., housing, jobs).
• At the same time, significant reductions in state funding for public schools in recent years have reduced the number of adults, especially teaching assistants, in public schools. In 2015, North Carolina ranked 47^th of 50 states with respect to per-pupil funding; at less than $7,000 per student, it spent just over one third of the amount allocated by the highest-spending states, New York and Alaska. ¹⁵  And while it provides a bit more funding for schools serving low-income students, the “F” for effort it receives from the Education Law Center – measuring the degree to which the state generates revenue for schools relative to its capacity to do so – renders that bright spot pretty much moot.¹⁶ Moreover, this failure to invest in public schools has caused  tangible harm to North Carolina students, especially its most disadvantaged ones: the state’s teachers are among the lowest-paid in the country relative to other adults with similar educational attainment – it ranks 41^st – making it difficult for the state to attract and retain qualified teachers now and into the future.¹⁷
• A significant increase in the number of charter schools in Durham has put financial strains on the traditional public schools with which EDCI works; it has also caused EDCI leadership to reexamine how the initiative relates to children from the Zone who attend these schools. EDCI has evolved to become a more child-focused model and, says President and CEO David Reese, is less interested on where a child goes to school than supporting schools that have the best interests of the children they serve in mind.¹⁸  As such, some of the initiatives strongest partnerships now include local public charter schools.

Indicators of Progress

In its first few years of implementation, EDCI has successfully established a strong foundation of support for children and families, a distinguished board of directors, and a growing Parent and Community Advisory Council that includes East Durham parents and caregivers. Outcomes and indicators that track EDCI’s progress in its first six years of implementation include:¹⁹

Reaching More Kids and Families in East Durham

• Between its 2011 inception and 2017, when the most recent evaluation data were collected, 1612 children from 845 families have been enrolled in EDCI. ²⁰ In the initiative’s sixth year, nearly 1,000 children were active in at least one EDCI program, and almost half (43%) participated in three or more programs, demonstrating intensive dosage and, thus, greater impact for a large share of Zone kids.
  • 291 families with newborns, over half of all Zone births, have received a Durham Connects nurse home visit since 2011, which provide interventions and education designed to improve health outcomes and reduce the risk of child maltreatment. And over 200 families with children ages 0-3 have participated in Healthy Families Durham/ Jumpstart home visiting since 2011, resulting in improved parenting skills and home environments and high immunization rates.
  •  128 families with children ages 0-5 worked with an EDCI Early Childhood Parent Advocate in Year 6. Virtually every parent reported receiving helpful resources from their Parent Advocate that improved their child’s learning, and 94% of children working with a Parent Advocate for two years showed developmental and age-appropriate skills. Parents also reported significant increases in their time spent telling stories and singing to their children each week. 51 children and parents attended EDCI Story Hour, a weekly program promoting early literacy and parent engagement.
  • EDCI staff also refer families to other early intervention services, like speech therapy and hearing tests; 23 families were referred in 2017.
  • Over the years of EDCI’s growth, Parent Advocates have increased their engagement and impact. Along with LEAP Academy staff, they offered 17 family workshops on various topics, like supporting child development, childhood trauma, and preparing for End-of-Grade tests. In 2017, 279 families with 626 children were served by an EDCI Early Childhood or Elementary School Parent Advocate, and nearly two-thirds of all children engaged had a Parent Advocate. That same year, almost 200 families worked with an EDCI Elementary School Parent Advocate, and 91% of surveyed parents stated that the Advocate had given them helpful information and advice to improve their child’s education. The majority of parents reported that their Elementary School Parent Advocate had helped to facilitate communication with teachers and school staff, and parents with an Advocate reported significant increases in the time they spent helping children with homework and attending school events or meetings. ²¹

Improving Access to Early Care and Education Boosts Kindergarten Readiness

• Through a groundbreaking partnership with Durham County Social Services and Child Care Services Association, EDCI is working to address barriers to high-quality childcare access for families with working parents. In 2017, dozens of children received prioritized child care subsidies or scholarships without having to be placed on or go through waiting lists. ²²
• Since 2012, 170 children have participated in Stepping Stones, a kindergarten readiness program at Y.E. Smith Elementary offered in partnership with Duke’s Office of Durham and Regional Affairs. In 2017, three quarters of participating children were assessed as kindergarten ready across four key domains of school readiness: self-regulation, social expression, kindergarten academics, and motor skills (up from just 12% at the start).

• 

  Since February 2015, EDCI has partnered with LEAP (Latino Educational Achievement Partnership) to offer high-quality, half-day preschool for English and Spanish-speaking families living in the Zone. In fall 2016, the Academy expanded to include an afternoon session as well, and in 2017, it served 33 students ages 3-5. ²³  Since 2015, 95 percent of Academy graduates have been assessed as kindergarten ready.

My grandson loves the EDCI LEAP Academy. They are very hands on. Thank you so much for a wonderful experience. —EDCI caregiver ²⁴

• In addition, transition-to-Kindergarten activities for rising kindergarteners and their parents were offered at Y.E. Smith and Eastway Elementary Schools by Durham’s Partnership for Children in collaboration with school staff and EDCI. And evaluation data show that the longer children are enrolled in EDCI, the better their early literacy scores and attendance, and the more programs kindergarteners are enrolled in, the lower their rates of tardiness and truancy.

Strengthening Literacy Skills

• Since 2011, EDCI has helped promote literacy through the implementation of HillRAP (Hill Reading Achievement Program) tutoring for low-performing students at Y.E. Smith. A randomized control study performed as a part of EDCI’s evaluation of HillRAP in 2012 showed that control-group students declined in their literacy skills over the school year compared with HillRAP intervention students, who either maintained or improved their reading abilities.²⁵

Enriching Out-of-School Time and Preventing Summer Learning Loss

• Thanks to the support of over a dozen partners, 29 students participated in EDCI STEAM Saturdays workshops, a program newly enacted in Year 6. Over 60 fourth and fifth graders participated in the first year of EDCI’s Youth Leadership Council, where students had the opportunity to create original projects focused on improving health opportunities in the Zone, including mobile farmers markets, a school walkathon, and a community field day.
• Several EDCI partners engaged Zone children in additional out-of-school learning opportunities, like Kidznotes and Girl Scouts, and DPS Community, and dozens of families received low-cost memberships to the Museum of Life and Science.
• Since its inception, EDCI has built up capacity for students to enroll in a variety of summer camps. In 2017, more than 180 students attended three summer camps: EDCI STEAM Summer Camp, EDCI BELL Summer Camp, and YMCA Camp High Hopes. YMCA summer camp students averted any losses in literacy, while students who participated in the STEAM summer camp made significant gains in literacy, and BELL summer camp students gained a month in literacy and one and a half months in math. Also that year, EDCI launched its first staff-operated camp through a partnership with NC State University’s College of Education. Professors designed the curriculum and trained student teachers to instruct daily classes in reading, writing, and math.
• In addition, all Y.E. Smith and Eastway Elementary School students receive 10 free books to read over the summer through Book Harvest’s Books on Break.

Promoting Health and Nutrition

• EDCI uses multiple strategies to help families access healthy food through partnerships with key service providers. In the initiative’s most recent year, twenty families participated in parent-child cooking classes and food education, 58 families got support from EDCI staff to access food pantries and apply for SNAP, and 73 families participated at mobile farmers markets. And just in that one year, 563 children and adults enjoyed over 5,000 hot, healthy meals at EDCI Summer Lunch, with food provided by the Inter-Faith Food Shuttle.
• Health is advanced through both medical and non-medical paths. The relationships it cultivated enabled 20 children to play on two EDCI basketball teams in Durham Parks and Recreation’s league. And EDCI staff connect Zone families not only to nutrition supports, but also to health services, like helping them access mental and behavioral health services and Medicaid.

Empowering Adults and Engaging the Community

• 

  EDCI’s two-generation approach is well-suited to enhance parents’ skills and abilities. In 2017, 27 parents participated in English for Speakers of Other Languages classes offered by the Durham Literacy Center, helping to both build their language skills and better support their children’s education. And 32 women living in the Zone pursued career opportunities thanks to assistance with resume- and cover letter-writing and career coaching from Dress for Success. Parents are also empowered by support for their children at school: nearly 500 students received new backpacks stuffed with school supplies in 2017, and over 400 children and adults attended EDCI’s End of Summer celebration.

• That approach is also designed to advance community development more broadly, and EDCI parents report that it is working. Virtually all parents surveyed (93%) said that EDCI helped them feel more connected to their neighbors, and over four in five reported telling a friend or neighbor about EDCI programs and services.

Contact

Mary Mathew, Director of Program Planning and Partner Engagement, [email protected], (919) 908-8709, or visit www.edci.org.

Endnotes

1. WStrauss, B. (2009). [Duke University’s Children’s Environmental Health Initiative: Population demographics within EDCI neighborhood estimated from 2000 Census data]. Unpublished data.

2. Gih, B. Population Demographics within EDCI Neighborhood Estimated from 2015 American Community Survey Data. 2017. Rice University’s Children’s Environmental Health Initiative Unpublished data.

3. This Zone-specific data comes from various unpublished data sources including the Child Care Services Association, NC Center for Health Statistics, Durham Public Schools, Durham County Social Services, Durham County Dept of Public Health, and MDC. They are all mentioned and referenced in EDCI’s 2010 Promise Neighborhood Grant Narrative—Reference: EDCI Promise Neighborhoods Planning Grant Submission, 2011. U.S. Department of Education, and the child maltreatment data was updated in the EDCI Year 3 Evaluation Report.

4. Education First, “Education First NC School Report Cards.”

5. Personal communication with David Reese, EDCI President and CEO, on April 27, 2018.

6. East Durham Children’s Initiative, About and Mission. http://edci.org/en/about

7. For a list of EDCI partners, visit the EDCI website. E. Snyder, N. Lawrence, and K. Rosanbalm, East Durham Children’s Initiative: Year Three Evaluation Report, Durham, NC: Duke University Center for Child and Family Policy, 2014.

8. http://edci.org/en/services/elementary-school. 

9. http://edci.org/en/services/elementary-school/edci-saturday-program.

10. Response to EDCI Summer Camp 2014 Parent/Caregiver Survey.

11. http://edci.org/en/services/community-programs/health/edci-summer-lunch

12. http://edci.org/en/services/elementary-school/edci-elementary-school-programs/edci-youth-leadership-council

13. http://edci.org/en/services/community-programs/health/edci-healthy-living-initiative

14. Elaine Weiss personal communication with Lauren Stephenson, EDCI Development Manager, April 10, 2018.

15. Figure 1, Predicted Funding Level, 2015. From Bruce D. Baker, Danielle Farrie, and David Sciara, Is School Funding Fair? A National Report Card. Seventh edition, Feb. 2018. Education Law Center. http://www.edlawcenter.org/assets/files/pdfs/publications/Is_School_Funding_Fair_7th_Editi.pdf

16. Figure 2, State Funding Distribution, and 5, Fiscal Effort- Gross State Product, Education Law Center 2018.

17. Figure 9, Wage Competitiveness, Education Law Center 2018.

18. Elaine Weiss personal communication with David Reese, April 2018.

19. If not otherwise referenced, data below are from this report: E. Snyder, N. Lawrence, and K. Rosanbalm, East Durham Children’s Initiative: Year Three Evaluation Report.

20. East Durham Children’s Initiative Impact Summary, Year 6.

21. Ibid.

22. This is a rough estimate based on Stepping Stones data. EDCI leaders know that more children in the Zone have accessed child care via prioritization, referrals, NC Pre K assistance, and LEAP Academy, but it is not possible to know the specific percentage for Zone kids.

23. Ibid.

24. Response to EDCI Parent/Caregiver Survey 2017.

25.East Durham Children’s Initiatve: Year Two Report. Completed by Duke Center for Child and Family Policy, December 2013.

Pea Ridge, a small city in Benton County, in Northwest Arkansas close to the headquarters of Walmart, has experienced a growing range of unmet student needs in recent years. While median household income in the city proper is over $57,000, substantially higher than the $40,511 state median, household income varies widely across the areas covered by the school district.1 Just south of Pea Ridge in Little Flock, median household income is over $65,000, and the poverty rate is about 5 percent. On the eastern edge of the school district, in Gateway, median household income is $42,000, and more than 12 percent of residents live below the federal poverty line. Funding for school lunches grew by more than $30,000 between 2011–2012 and 2014–2015 in a district serving just 850 students.2 Challenges ranged from the need for food and clothing among elementary school students to broken homes and homelessness among high school students.

“I had difficulty finding resources that met the needs of kids, and we knew that we were not identifying all the needs that were there. I think that’s the way a lot of districts are.” -Pea Ridge superintendent Rick Neal.3

 Response

In 2013, Pea Ridge superintendent Rick Neal, who had been the Pea Ridge high school principal from 2005 to 2012, had no way of addressing students’ needs through school-based strategies alone, and no mechanism for leveraging the resources of the community to meet those needs. Neal saw the potential to address the unmet needs of students and their families through Bright Futures, an organization that uses community-building to tackle poverty-related impediments to learning and student success.

 Strategy for Change

With each of its affiliated communities (38 as of December, 2015) Bright Futures works to build grassroots capacity and leadership to meet children’s needs. The goal is to tap the resources of time, talent, and treasure that are unique to each community. All Bright Futures districts commit to three main goals: 1) creating systems to identify and deliver resources to meet any child’s basic needs within 24 hours notice; 2) building community leadership capacity to apply problem-solving techniques to challenges confronting today’s youth; and 3) providing students and teachers in the schools with service-learning; curriculum-based, hands-on service experiences that assist the community while growing generations of service-minded citizens.4

Coalition

Because the mission of Bright Futures is to build capacity within and among communities, the focus is on developing coalitions. In Pea Ridge, the core of the coalition is the school district, which has established partnerships with a range of public and private community organizations. Each partner advances one or more of the three core Bright Futures goals.

School district

The small school district includes one primary school, one intermediate school, one middle school, one high school, and one alternative learning school. Additionally, in 2014, the district opened Pea Ridge Manufacturing and Business Academy; a charter school designed to build on student’s unique strengths and increase their success beyond high school.

Bright Futures USA

As a partner, Bright Futures USA brings three elements to the coalition. The Bright Futures Board of Directors provides oversight to the organization and staff to carry out the mission of Bright Futures. The organization provides training, resources, and ongoing support to Bright Futures affiliate communities. The Advisory Board for each affiliate community consists of faith-based organizations, human-service agencies, business partners, and parents. The boards actively mobilize community resources to tackle district-wide challenges and provide ongoing support to building-level Bright Futures Councils. Each school within a community has its own Bright Futures Council with representation from school faculty/staff, parents, students, faith-based organizations, human service agencies, and the business community. The council’s primary responsibility is to mobilize resources at the school/community level to support teaching and learning.

Private partners

Also part of the coalition are local businesses, including Arvest Bank and Walmart, and faith-based organizations, including local community churches and the Ministerial Alliance.

Comprehensive services

In keeping with the Bright Futures philosophy, Pea Ridge provides supports at both the student level and at the school- and district-wide levels. When a student need is identified internally, a referral is made to the designated school personnel. The appropriate human service agency or nonprofit group is contacted to fill that need. If the need cannot be filled within 24 hours by one of these organizations, the district uses social media to engage the community in filling the need.

If the district is still unable to fill the need, it taps a high-needs fund that is supported by donors. The funds can be used immediately to purchase a needed item or service to support a student. Although seldom used due to the effectiveness of the first two tiers in the three-tier process, the fund can fill gaps, ensuring that any need is met within 24 hours. In addition, Pea Bridge Bright Futures offers a range of in- and out-of-school supports for students and their families:

Early childhood education

 The Pea Ridge School District opened its first pre-K program in the 2014–2015 school year. A three-year $300,000 grant from the Endeavor Foundation provided funding for 20 children who meet the requirements for the state’s pre-K program for at-risk children, Arkansas Better Chance (ABC), to attend at no cost.5 The program also offers an additional 20 tuition-based spots, which helps ensure that the pre-K program serves students of diverse races, ethnicities, and socioeconomic status.6

Physical and mental health

Students’ physical health needs are supported by the City of Pea Ridge’s local physician and local dentist, and the Pea Ridge School District’s four nurses, who provide eye exams, flu vaccinations, etc. Students’ mental health needs are supported through a three-tier strategy:

• The school district has designated a social worker to provide individualized support services to students and families based upon needs.
• Three area agencies—Ozark Guidance, Vantage Point, and Day Springs—provide mental health professionals who offer individual, family, and group therapy to students.
• The school district also works closely with these and other area mental health agencies to offer therapeutic day treatment to students whose severe emotional and behavioral issues preclude their participation in the traditional school setting. Providers include Ozark Guidance Therapeutic Day Treatment, Vantage Point Day Treatment, and ALEX Treatment Day Program (which is designed to support high school students).

Mentoring and tutoring

• Lunch Buddies is an on-site program that allows community members to meet at least twice a month with a child—the “lunch buddy”—during the student’s recess/lunch period for the entire school year.
• Car/Bus buddies is a community/business group organized by City of Pea Ridge leaders who welcome and encourage elementary students when they are arrive at school. Car/bus buddies have included the Pea Ridge football Blackhawks’ mascot (Hank the Hawk), Northwest Arkansas Naturals’ baseball mascot (Strike), and Mayor Jackie Crabtree and his staff.

Academic enrichment

• The Pea Ridge Manufacturing and Business Academy (PRMBA), which opened for the 2014–2015 school year, is centered on the philosophy that every student is a Career and Technology Education (CTE) student, and that students should not be limited to only one post-graduation track, college. The goal is to equip students who graduate from PRMBA to go straight to work, to attend a two-year community college or technical school, or to attend a four-year college or university, as they choose. Students who are involved in PRMBA have been supported by Bright Futures through donations of work clothing, and with money for certification and for tuition for local community college courses.
• Pea Ridge Academy provides an opportunity for high-rish students who may have special academic and other needs. Students who attend the academy have fallen behind due to external situations such as pregnancy, poor attendance, or poor support systems in the home. As an alternative learning environment, the academy provides a second chance by letting students work in a small group environment and one-on-one with teachers.

• Academy students also have access to a range of off-campus resources, both academic and non-academic. These resources, some of which are available online, include:
  • AR Alternative Education
  • Pea Ridge Social Work Services
  • R.E.A.P. (Rogers Educational Alternative Program)
  • AR Association of Alternative Educators
  • National Alternative Education Association
  • JAG Resources (Jobs for Arkansas Graduates)
• Students may also regularly participate in hands-on, curriculum-based, service-learning projects that foster citizenship and leadership.

After-school and summer program

• Pea Ridge School District partners with the Rogers Activity Center to provide after-school programs to third- through sixth-graders at the intermediate school gymnasium.
• Pea Ridge primary and intermediate teachers delivered young adult books to children within the Pea Ridge school district during summer 2015. By partnering with Bright Futures and several local businesses, the Pea Ridge Book Bus project helped keep over 183 students engaged and enjoying the love of reading.

Family/social support

The district’s intentional and visible use of social media provides a meaningful way for individual community members to support children by putting the resources they have in their closets, attics, and basements to good use.

• The school district has established a Bright Futures Closet that serves as a central repository donated items that counselors can draw from when ensuring that every child’s basic needs are met.
• Pea Ridge School District uses its Bright Futures Facebook page to communicate student and family needs for clothing and other items and to thank those who respond.7 The page also spreads the word about events like Stuff-the-Bus, described below, and service activities for students (through production of videos, etc.).

• The school district’s social workers offer a range of resources through their webpage, including school-based mental health providers, area hotlines for child abuse and neglect, food pantries, rental assistance, and information about local thrift stores. 8 And to simplify application processes,, the page also provides downloadable forms for a range of public assistance benefits, such as low-income housing subsidies and free and reduced-price school meals, and offers to help complete applications.

Bright Futures-affiliated support system

The Pea Ridge School District has adopted several Bright Futures projects that complement its other services for students and their families. These include:

• Bright Futures Closet and Pantry: Pea Ridge Bright Futures manages a local clothing and food donation site that supports other Bright Futures–affiliated events and helps serve students within the district.
• Freedom Fest: During this local festival Bright Futures collect items for the Bright Futures Closet and Pantry.
• Rent the Tent: This fundraising event is held during the Pea Ridge Blackhawk football season.
• Operation College Bound: Bright Futures sponsors this event to take students from kindergarten through 5^th grade on tours of local colleges and universities, to encourage their aspirations to postsecondary education.
• Daddy/Daughter Dance: Bright Futures works with the Pea Ridge Parent Teacher Organization to increase school involvement in promoting girls’ positive self-image.
• Cap & Gown and Prom Extravaganza: Bright Futures seeks to eliminate the poverty gap in experience by providing students with opportunities to celebrate reaching important milestones.
• Scholarship program: Through Bright Futures’ fundraising activities, Pea Ridge is able to offer three $1,000 college scholarships to students who have participated in service-learning activities.
• Community service: Bright Futures trains volunteers on school and community policies and practices.

 Foundational Policies and Practices

A few core practices and policies have both been instrumental in the progress Pea Ridge Bright Futures has made in its first two-plus years and pose a challenge going forward.

State funding provides benefits that are not necessarily stable or sufficient

The state of Arkansas releases additional funds – National School Lunch Act (NSLA), or school poverty funding – to individual schools based on their level of student poverty, as calculated by eligibility for subsidized meals. Schools use those funds to help meet a range of student needs through services that can include extra instructional aides for Response to Intervention (RTI), school nurses, and social workers. Pea Ridge Superintendent Neal notes that these funds, which he has used to hire a social worker for Bright Futures, are never sufficient to meet the needs and are constantly in danger of being eliminated from the budget.9 He feels that poverty-induced challenges to school success make sustaining these funds challenging:

“There’s a real struggle with state legislators who look at capturing these dollars [by cutting them from the budget], because they see only negative connections between their allocation and student achievement. As a result, superintendents across the state are struggling with this, and I’m telling you, you take these funds away from the things we’re doing, the issues that we’re dealing with, I don’t know how I could do the things I do.”10—Pea Ridge Superintendent Rick Neal

While the state of Arkansas funds a high-quality pre-K program, Arkansas Better Chance (ABC), it has not allocated sufficient funds to serve all of the state’s eligible preschoolers. Pea Ridge, along with many other school districts, does not have funded slots for its three- and four-year-olds, so it turned to a private donor, whose grant, combined with tuition from parents who can afford to pay, currently supports the district’s pre-K program.

Service learning presents both benefits and new challenges

Service learning, which is core to the Bright Futures strategy for empowering students and families, improving communities, and raising academic achievement, has been well established in Pea Ridge. However, superintendent Rick Neal reports that helping teachers to incorporate it into their curricula poses challenges. Teachers need to understand its benefits, see examples of how students can give back, and take time and thought to prepare their own service-learning activities.

Identifying students’ needs goes beyond basic teacher training

Teachers are taught to see their core mission as teaching content, meeting deadlines, and following guidelines. Training them to observe and respond to students’ basic needs is thus an extension of basic teacher preparation for many. To fulfill this need, Pea Ridge offers district-wide professional development on concepts such as understanding poverty and how to look for signs that a student is falling through the cracks. Over the past two years, those professional development strategies have fostered a new tradition of giving back in the schools and the community and significantly enhanced teachers’ personal relationships with students, superintendent Neal says.

 Indicators of Progress

Bright Futures has been operating just a few years and thus hasn’t produced a broad enough data set to fully assess its impact on student progress. Nevertheless superintendent Neal sees some clear indications of improvement.

The Pea Ridge district is offering a range of Bright Futures-affiliated supports for students and families

• In August 2015, the back-to-school bash offered all the district’s students and their families school supplies, haircuts, and clothing, and served breakfast to all community members in attendance. This followed the July “stuff-the-bus” event, which provided free school supplies to students who are most in need.
• At Christmas, the school district supports the Angel Tree program, in which families sponsor students (and/or families) who would otherwise not receive gifts during the holidays. In 2016, Community First Bank and Walmart, among others, provided sponsors.

Service learning, one of Bright Futures’ core components, is taking root

• In November, 2015, high school Accelerated Growth Advisory Students (AGS) hosted a canned food drive for the Bright Futures food pantry. AGS students created PSAs and competed with one another to gather more than 3,000 cans of food.

• Service learning is happening among even the youngest district students. The Pea Ridge Primary students held their annual coin drive for the community during the 2015 Fall Festival. This year, students and parents raised $1,586.00 for “Heart and Sole,” a program providing shoes and socks to students in need throughout the district.11

Individual student and school metrics show progress

Because Bright Futures initiatives are shaped by each community’s assets and needs, what one community defines as success is likely to be quite different from how another defines it. As Joplin, Missouri Public Schools superintendent CJ Huff notes,

For example, Joplin was focusing community resources on improving the graduation rate…it worked. In contrast, Columbia, Missouri, has seen a different need, which is about creating more enrichment opportunities for all students, and those efforts are working there. So measuring success among Bright Futures districts really has to happen on a community-by-community basis. Long term, their success will be measured by shrinking the percentage of families living in poverty, parents’ ability to hold a job and support a family, and other such indicators that children, families, and communities are thriving.12

In Pea Ridge, Superintendent Neal seeks indications that the targeted student and family supports are making it easier for students to graduate high school and to transition to the next stages of their lives. Some early examples of progress toward those goals include:

• At the primary and intermediate levels, frequent residential moves disrupt both individual students and their teachers and peers. Two families who have received Bright Futures–related supports have been able to reduce the disruption associated with moving. Support with transportation to Arkansas Children’s Hospital in Little Rock, along with hotel and meal costs, allowed the sick student’s sibling to remain in school at Pea Ridge and the mother to stay with her child in Little Rock. Bright Futures was able to help another family with multiple siblings that was several months behind on utility bills stay in the home by reaching out to local utility companies and helping to offset the cost.
• High school–level supports have helped students participate in extracurricular activities and advanced their career paths.
  • Four students who received work boots were thus able to obtain experience in welding, which provided them with a potential career path and encouraged them to stay engaged in school.
  • In collaboration with Bright Futures, a Pea Ridge doctor volunteered her time and services to ensure that all students wishing to participate on a sports team can obtain the required physical exam (without which they would be deemed ineligible).
  • Clothing donations have enabled various school groups, such as choir, to increase student participation at school assemblies.
  • Bright Futures has helped fund Certified Nursing Assistant (CNA) licensing exams for four students, one of whom completed both the written and skills components, making her eligible for entrance into the medical field. The other three still need to pass one of the two parts to advance.13

More efforts are being made to identify the impact of Bright Futures on both schools and the community as a whole. The district is establishing systems to evaluate retention in primary and intermediate schools, school involvement/engagement, attendance, and grades at the middle and high school levels.14

Gains in more established Bright Futures’ communities are encouraging

Bright Futures was launched in 2010 in response to calls for Joplin, Missouri Public Schools superintendent CJ Huff to raise the district’s high school graduation rate. Recognizing the many impediments to students’ school and life success posed by the high rate of poverty in the community, Huff launched a community-wide strategic planning process in the fall of 2008. That process spawned Bright Futures in Joplin.

Several indicators of progress are evident, including:

• The number of volunteers increased from 126 in 2010 to 483 in 2015, contributing over 7,706 hours of volunteer service during the 2014-15 school year.15
• The number of community partnerships nearly quadrupled, from 34 in 2010 to 132 in 2015.{16}}
• The number of dropouts in a cohort fell by more than 50 percent, from 131 out of 510 (in the class of 2008) to 57 out of 532 (class of 2015).{17}}
• Graduation rates increased from 74.3 percent in 2008 to 86.3 percent in 2015.{18}}
• Cash and in-kind donations from the community to support student success has exceeded $500,000 annually since the inception of Bright Futures.{19}}

As a result of the success of the Bright Futures effort in Joplin, many other surrounding communities asked to replicate the effort.

• In February 2011, the organization attained nonprofit status, and by the end of that year, there were five Bright Futures affiliates in Missouri.
• As of 2015, Bright Futures was active in 38 communities throughout Missouri, Kansas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Iowa, North Carolina and Virginia.{20}}

 Contact

Rick Neal, superintendent, Pea Ridge Public Schools, [email protected], (479)228-2059, or visit www.facebook.com/BrightFuturesPeaRidge

 Endnotes

1. “Pea Ridge, Arkansas (AR) income map, earnings map, and wages data,” City-data.com.

2.  http://www.prs.k12.ar.us/uploads/2/5/9/9/25990010/copy_of_revenue_sources_through_2014_15_actual.pdf

3. From email correspondence with Elaine Weiss, December 2015. Unless otherwise noted, information and details about the district were provided by Pea Ridge School District superintendent Rick Neal and/or district staff.

4.  “Why Bright Futures?” Bright Futures USA (website).

5. While the state does fund the high-quality ABC program, no funds were available in 2014–2016 to add Pea Ridge students, so this funding makes pre-K privately available to students who qualify for ABC but lack access.

6.  “Pea Ridge Pre-K,” Pea Ridge School District (website).

7.  https://www.facebook.com/BrightFuturesPeaRidge. According to Bright Futures founder and former Joplin, Missouri, superintendent CJ Huff, Facebook has been a critical tool for the Joplin and subsequent Bright Futures affiliates to connect community members with unmet needs to resources within the community and in nearby communities.

8. Pea Ridge Social Work Services (website).

9. Benjamin Hardy, “Education Committee Leaves NSLA Funds Flat for Fourth Year, Waits on Teacher Salary Increase.” Arkansas Times. October 14, 2014.

10. Conversation with Elaine Weiss, November 2015.

11.  “Primary School Coin Drive,” Blackhawk Brag Page, Pea Ridge School District.

12. From email communication with Elaine Weiss, November 2015.

13. Students took these exams on January 6 and 7, 2016. (Elaine Weiss email correspondence with Pea Ridge superintendent Rick Neal on January 8, 2016).

14. The district’s social worker began to collect data on individual students from each school starting in the fall of the 2015–16 school year. Spring data collection will assess specific students whose needs were met in the fall in order to

15. Data from email from Melissa Winston, Joplin Bright Futures Coordinator, and “Bright Futures Financial Overview,” Joplin School Board report dated October 27, 2015

16. Data provided by Melissa Winston, BF Joplin Coordinator, date

17. Data from Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education and Joplin High School Administration.

18. Data from Missouri Department of Elementary Education and Joplin High School Administration.

19. “Bright Futures Financial Overview,” Joplin School Board report dated October 27, 2015.

20.  “Our History, A Bright Idea,” Bright Futures USA website.