The City Connects approach to student support was written up this week in District Administration magazine. From the article:
Boston Public Schools is seeing the results of City Connects—an intervention, prevention and enrichment program that, for a decade, has worked with teachers to pair students with community-based services to help students better engage and thrive in school.
Read the full article here!
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As a follow-up to yesterday’s post, which discussed the link between family violence and bullying, a new paper in the journal Pediatrics shows that both bullies and their victims make more frequent trips to the school nurse than their peers. These visits were not just related to injuries sustained as a result of bullying and indicate that the school nurse may be an effective place to identify cases of bullying. The study, conducted by Eric Vernberg of the University of Kansas, followed 600 students in grades 3 through 5 at six schools for a year.
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Bullying and family violence may be related, according to a new report conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Massachusetts Department of Public Health.
The report analyzed the 2009 Massachusetts Youth Risk Behavior Survey, an anonymous survey given to randomly chosen schools every two years. In 2009, the first year that bullying was included in the questionnaire, 138 public middle schools and high schools participated in the survey.
The results show a striking correlation between family violence and bullying. Compared with students who were neither bullies nor bullying victims, both middle and high school bully-victims reported much higher instances of being physically hurt by a family member (23.2% versus 5.1% for middle school; 20.4% versus 4.7% for high school) or witnessing violence in their family (22.8% versus 6.6% for middle school; 30.6% versus 7.2% for high school).
Key findings from the report include:
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The Boston Globe has published the second article in its “Getting In” series about the Boston Public Schools’ lottery, “Relief, dismay, even guilt greet student placements.” In this installment, parents learn of their child’s school placement. Some parents were thrilled, while others weren’t so lucky in getting their first choice.
The series follows 13 families through the Boston Public Schools’ lottery for school assignment. The first article, “Taking a Chance, Making a Choice,” introduced a South End family who is considering moving to the suburbs if the lottery doesn’t work out in their favor.
The Harlem Globetrotters were in town last weekend and put on a show for fifth graders from Roxbury’s Emerson Elementary at the new Ray and Joan Kroc Corps Community Center in Dorchester’s Upham’s Corner neighborhood. Pictured at right are the Globetrotters giving some basketball tips to Emerson principal Dr. Vivian Swoboda and Major Robert Kountz of the Salvation Army. The Kroc Center, which has fitness, aquatic, health, and worship space in addition to a brand-new gymnasium, officially opens April 1.
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Last night, 60 Minutes reported on the sharp increase of children living in poverty with a story titled, “Homeless Children: The Hard Times Generation.” Census data showed that 47.8 million Americans–15.7% of the U.S. population–lived in poverty in 2009 [see our related post, “Revised Census Numbers Show More Americans Living in Poverty”].
We know that there is a widening income gap between high-income and middle-class families, and we also know that poverty can suppress a child’s potential to excel. As we have seen in our experiences, poverty creates stress for children and can impede their ability to thrive in school. As the children in story explain, it’s hard to study at home when the electricity has been turned off.
From the story:
The government considers a family of four to be impoverished if they take in less than $22,000 a year. Based on that standard, and government projections of unemployment, it is estimated the poverty rate for kids in this country will soon hit 25 percent. Those children would be the largest American generation to be raised in hard times since the Great Depression.
We are happy to announce the publication of our 2010 Annual Report, The Impact of City Connects. Again this year, our report presents strong evidence of the positive effects of City Connects for students and their families, for teachers and staff who work in our schools, and for our community partners.
Among the findings this year:
We are grateful to all of our school district and community partners for their commitment to addressing the out-of-school factors that impact students’ lives. The report is evidence of the success of our collaboration.
City Connects is proud to announce that we’ve signed on to join the OpportunityNation coalition! OpportunityNation is a national coalition of business leaders, nonprofits, social entrepreneurs, and grassroots organizations working to advance a nonpartisan/bipartisan agenda to enhance opportunity and economic mobility in America. Right now, the coalition comprises more than 80 organizations; see the list of everyone here. We look forward to participating in the dialogue and being a champion for the role of education in opportunity.
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