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These are some of the things we’ve been reading about:
Harvard’s Education Redesign Lab looks at personalized success plans and how Salem, Mass., has been working with City Connects to implement these plans for students.
Sports help adolescents overcome childhood trauma.
States are addressing the needs of youth in foster care.
U.S. children are better off today than they were in 2000.
Summer opportunities fair at Dayton Early College Academy
As the school year draws to a close, City Connects Coordinators across the country are helping studentsprepare for summer, connecting them to services and opportunities that will help them succeed when school isn’t in session.
For, Asha Quattrocchi, a City Connects Coordinator at the Cold Spring School in Indianapolis, Ind., this means sharing information and making connections.
Quattrocchi went with two other coordinators to a summer camp fair. They gathered information on camps that offer arts, dance, sports, STEM, and academics programs. Quattrocchi brought this information back to her school and shared it at family night, a monthly event.
She followed up with parents to see if they’d chosen a camp and to ask if they needed any help signing their children up.
“The biggest obstacle is transportation,” Quattrocchi explains. To address this, she’s helping parents to connect with each other so they can carpool. Another challenge is cost, so Quattrocchi is connecting families with organizations that offer scholarships and asking other organizations if they can lower their fees. Continue reading →
It’s budget season in Ohio, and last week, Lieutenant Governor Jon Husted and other state officials, including Superintendent of Public Instruction Paolo DeMaria, visited Chaminade Julienne Catholic High School in Dayton to see City Connects in action.
Husted is encouraging his state to increase its investment in students’ success.
“We believe that this is a replicable model that can be used in public schools and other schools across the state,” Husted tellsWHIO Television. “And we want the new money that’s being put into the budget to serve these students to go to programs like this.”
“The visit comes as legislators are considering a new $550 million allocation in the state budget to provide similar ‘wraparound services’ to Ohio schools,”the Dayton Daily News reports. “That budget has already passed the Ohio House, and Lt. Gov. Jon Husted advocated for the plan Friday.”Continue reading →
In this book, Weiss and Reville call on schools and communities to stop failing by creating “systems ofintegrated student supports (ISS) for all children.”
The two authors say it is crucial to create ISS systems that support the whole child — like City Connects and others in the field — because of the nation’s history of mediocre policy achievements.
“Decades of education reform efforts have yielded modest if any improvements in most places where poverty is present,” they write. “To be sure, there are outliers, schools and individuals defying the odds, but on average, we still have an iron-clad correlation between socioeconomic status and education achievement and attainment.”Continue reading →
