Community groups often stand at the ready to help schools with challenges like hunger, housing instability, and mentorship needs, but it takes a thoughtful person to connect those resources to the students who need them most and to monitor their progress, said Rey Salda帽a, President and CEO of Communities in 69传媒.
The national nonprofit organization trains school-based coordinators to help manage what it calls 鈥渋ntegrated student supports,鈥� like donations and social services provided by out-of-school organizations. Those coordinators use data about factors like absenteeism to monitor the effectiveness of their work and to identify students who help.
Communities in 69传媒 recently announced two new initiatives. A $13 million donation from the Ballmer Group will allow the organization鈥檚 state and local affiliates to offer Communities in 69传媒 programming at 213 new schools and expand offerings at 32 existing sites, reaching 130,000 new students. Affected schools will match the Ballmer contribution for three years before committing to covering the costs on their own. The $13 million is the first tranche from a $165 million donation that the Ballmer Group, a philanthropic organization founded by former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, announced in February.
The second effort involves an innovative cohort of six school districts in areas without Communities in 69传媒 affiliates. Rather than placing its own coordinators in schools, the organization will train existing school employees in its model and commission an independent evaluation of their results. This project will be supported by a $10 million gift from The Studio @ Blue Meridian, a philanthropy group.
Salda帽a spoke to Education Week about the importance of student supports in districts鈥� recovery efforts.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How would you explain 鈥渋ntegrated student supports鈥� to someone who is unfamiliar with the concept?
I want folks to think about it as an added person into the ecosystem of a school to connect with students and build relationships.
69传媒 now are asking, how do we build support systems for students for non-academic issues? Namely, if they鈥檝e got unstable housing, if they鈥檝e got food insecurity issues. How do we ensure a student shows up if they don鈥檛 have clean clothing, or if they have a parent who is incarcerated or dealing with addiction or trauma? If you don鈥檛 care for those issues, then you鈥檙e not going to really have a lot of success with math and reading scores.
Integrated supports means you have to understand how you manage a data system that tracks a student鈥檚 progress, that that staff member understands how to do an assessment of the community resources, whether those are the local food banks, mental health services, optometrists, or legal services.
How do we invite [community organizations] to cut through the red tape to get resources to the students in in the school day? That is hard work. It鈥檚 not complicated work, but it is hard work.
69传媒 are dealing with high levels of chronic absenteeism. And educators were concerned about student mental health even before the pandemic. Why is this an important moment for your organization?
What this work looks like in Charlotte, N.C., is different than what it looks like on the border in Laredo, Texas, and different than it how would look in in Chicago. We are learning how to customize the work in a standard way. I think it鈥檚 really advanced the field that Communities in 69传媒 has been helping to build that understand the importance of wraparound Student Services, along with other strong nonprofits.
We鈥檝e grown from about 2,500 schools that we were operating in in 2020 to 3,200 in the span of the last three years. And that鈥檚 a growth clip we just haven鈥檛 seen. We are getting calls from superintendents who say, 鈥淵ou are in 10 of our schools, but we need you in 20.鈥�
How will this new cohort of six districts work? How is it different from your traditional model?
If we鈥檙e going to open up in Jackson, Miss., in our traditional fashion, we find an executive director, we establish a local board, and it takes us some time to make sure that we are fundraising to establish the funding resources we need.
This opportunity is helping us bypass this, for the sake of the urgent need we鈥檙e seeing in communities who want to be trained on how to do this work.
We at the national office will send over the trainers who can certify the existing staff on their campuses. And part of that contract commitment from the school district is that the staff members will be able to focus on the Communities in 69传媒 model. We can鈥檛 have this staff member also be doing truancy roundups. This has to be about building relationships with young people.
How might the external evaluation of that cohort contribute to the field?
We have to learn what sticks. School systems are really hard to change in how they treat students who are disruptive in class, who aren鈥檛 showing up for 10 percent of the school year. There are, in many cases, punitive paths for that kind of behavior ... that only make those students disconnect more from the school.
What we hope to learn is how to train staff members to build relationships with those young people? What is the buy-in we need from principals? What are the measures that truly drive impact?
Will the funding from the Ballmer group help you expand work in states where you already have affiliates?
One of the most significant pieces of what we鈥檙e getting ... is that they are allowing a real-time learning process to happen amongst our affiliates. This allows our affiliates to go to a superintendent and say, 鈥淲e want to expand to a few more schools and we鈥檙e going to pay for 50 percent of the cost for the next three years if you will contribute [the rest]鈥攚hether those are Title I funds, state funding, or county funds鈥攖o help meet the need.
We don鈥檛 want to have to fire 1,000 people after five years. There has to be skin in the game locally.
You鈥檙e doing this as schools prepare for the end of COVID relief funding, which many used to support this kind of student-support work.
What [school district leaders] have told us is, 鈥淭his is great that we鈥檝e got some national funding to seed this work. We think we鈥檙e going to prove why this work is necessary long term to our local city council or school board or legislature.鈥�
We think that the kind of results they see鈥攏ot just on the basic issues around attendance or dropout prevention, but in the level of engagement that we hope to see with the students鈥攚ill be enough to drive some important decision-making a few years down the road.
For a lot of us, this work feels personal.
As the leader of the organization, it鈥檚 personal for me as somebody who鈥檚 gone through the program myself [as a child] and knows what a difference it is when you鈥檝e got a safety net and somebody you can turn to.
One of the biggest losses from the pandemic has been those relationships inside schools for students who ask, 鈥淲ho can I count on when I鈥檓 dealing with something at home?鈥� and 鈥淲ho鈥檚 going to be around, even if I reject the fact that they want to help?鈥�
I don鈥檛 think there鈥檚 anything more powerful than an idea whose time has come, and I think the time has come for us to think about how we support students who are growing in need in this time.
