Communities In Schools of Washington News

Today’s blog post comes from Communities In Schools’ Executive Vice President of Marketing and Communications Mike Bento.

If you hear this message, wherever you stand
I’m calling every woman, calling every man
We’re the generation
We can’t afford to wait
The future started yesterday and we’re already late
~John Legend, If You’re Out There

Today Communities In Schools, in partnership with P&G Give EDUCATION and John Legend, is launching a massive campaign asking the American public to get involved in ensuring that more than 1.3 million young people achieve in school and succeed in life.

At noon, in New York City, we announced a groundbreaking partnership to engage the American public in our work, and gave them a simple way to make a contribution through the purchase of more than 30 P&G products featured in the July 31st brandSAVER®, delivered to more than 56 million homes.

I can’t tell you how exciting it was today seeing the premiere of a television ad featuring John Legend, along with six graduates from Communities In Schools of Newark. Look for that ad in the coming days, and go online through Facebook to the P&G myGIVE page, to see more video with John Legend and our students.

Oh I was looking for a song to sing
I searched for a leader
But the leader was me
We were looking for the world to change
We can be heroes

These lyrics describe Communities In Schools perfectly. In all of our affiliates, you meet ordinary folks doing extraordinary work. Site coordinators who are leaders, and who love young people into change, so that they can be leaders themselves. Executive directors, board members and volunteers who looked around and realized if the world was going to change, they were going to have to do it. They are truly heroes. And over the past few months, our student alumni have begun organizing themselves into a network – to support each other and to give back to the young people coming behind them. It’s a new generation of leaders, thanks to the love and commitment of more than 4,600 full-time staff and 57,000 volunteers in 200 communities across America.

The great thing about P&G Give EDUCATION is that it gives millions of Americans an easy way to be leaders and heroes themselves. It starts with redeeming a coupon, and then getting involved through the Communities In Schools and P&G myGIVE Facebook pages, and then maybe becoming a volunteer in a local Communities In Schools affiliate. Before you know it, you’re a hero, the kind they write songs about.

We’re the generation
We can’t afford to wait
The future started yesterday and we’re already late.

The recession has hit some towns harder than others. Estimates from the census bureau show unemployment in Auburn increased by four times. A lot of people who lost jobs have kids in school.

Pauline Thomas, principal at Washington Elementary in Auburn: “The stress level on the families has really gone up. The stress level on the kids has gone up.”

Communities In Schools of Auburn site coordinator Leslie Soule talks to KUOW’s Phyllis Fletcher about the backpacks of food sent home to struggling families so kids can eat well on the weekend.

You can see the transcript and hear the four–part series on public education and the recession here.

Congratulations to our Executive Director, Susan Richards!

Susan Richards, Executive Director of Communities In Schools of Washington state, has been named to the newly established Northwest Regional Advisory Committee of the Department of Education.

Susan is among roughly 100 leaders in education appointed to ten different regional committees to collect information on the educational needs of the nation. In her new role, Susan will gather information from state and local educators, school officials, business leaders, state education agencies, parents, the community and others. She and the other committee members will work on compiling the information they receive to develop a report outlining the educational needs across the various regions, and then recommend ways to address those needs. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is expected to receive the report by August 1, 2011.

The committees will also help the education department establish priorities for the upcoming Comprehensive Centers Program grant competition next year. The program provides technical assistance designed to help increase the capacity of states to support their districts and schools in increasing student achievement.

By Briana Kerensky, Communities In Schools National Office

In February, Communities In Schools released the results of a comprehensive, five-year evaluation aimed at determining the effectiveness of the organization’s work. The results of the study validated Communities In Schools’ mission and provided valuable insight into the work needed to be done to make dropout prevention a success. But what does it all mean? Communities In Schools President Dan Cardinali breaks down the value of the five-year evaluation’s results for the organization, for students and for nonprofits at large.

Why did Communities In Schools decide to conduct a five-year evaluation?

When we started the evaluation, Communities In Schools had been around for about 30 years and we wanted to know if we were actively making a difference. We had about $200 million in grants and we felt a great deal of accountability to our funders to make sure we were successful. We were working with about 900,000 kids at the time, and of course we felt accountable to them as well. We say that Communities In Schools’ relationships with students are transformative, so we wanted to validate that.

What do the results mean for the students Communities In Schools works with?

Once we know what an effective practice is, we are morally obliged to push that practice. Would you give a child the wrong dosage of medicine when you know what the right dosage is? The mandate is clear.

What can other nonprofit organizations take away from the evaluation results?

An evaluation can be very constructive, but nonprofits sometimes dread them for two reasons:

1. They’re expensive.
2. They often have an “I gotcha” feeling, like you’re looking for an organization’s faults.

But really, evaluations are a constructive experience. Communities In Schools’ five-year evaluation has enabled us to live our mission with fidelity and clarity. It’s made us more effective at achieving our mission.

What does the five-year evaluation mean for the future of Communities In Schools?

We now have a road map for what the Communities In Schools model looks like, and we can make sure it is routinely employed in communities in which we work and as we develop new affiliates.

When we were first building the affiliates, there was a lot of creativity. But there was also a lot of “inventing the wheel” every time. Now, with the five-year evaluation, Communities In Schools has the core elements in place. We can still be creative, but we’re not reinventing the wheel every time we build an affiliate.

What about the five-year evaluation are you most proud of?

I’m proud of a lot of things! But one thing that makes me proud is that we had a committee who spent two years designing the evaluation, and then guided the evaluation over the five-year period. It was made up of internal leadership, who are dropout prevention practitioners. But it was also made up of national experts who are luminaries in the area of dropout prevention. Together they provided guidance and a critical eye, and also managed to keep our evaluation practical. So our final product is a combination of the rigor of academics and the reality of what dropout prevention is. This makes our study important at a local, state and federal level.

Today’s post–good news from Olympia!

via Probst’s dropout prevention bill passes | The Columbian.

Today’s post comes from Briana Kerensky at our National office.

When a student makes the choice to drop out of school, it’s not usually a spur-of-the-moment decision. Years of academic, financial and social struggles often weigh a young person down, and by the time a student is of legal age to quit the classroom, he or she may have long ago abandoned any hope of getting a diploma.

How young are these kids when their derailment from the road to graduation begins? A new study released last week shows that the warning signs begin right when a child is still in elementary school: third grade.

The study, “Double Jeopardy: How Third-Grade Reading Skills and Poverty Influence High School Graduation,” revealed that a student who cannot read on grade level by the third grade is four times less likely to graduate by age 19 than a child who reads capably by that time. If poverty is factored into the reason a child is struggling to read, that student is 13 times less likely to graduate on time.

Why does third grade seem to be the critical age to measure a student’s potential success? Previous studies have suggested that students begin to fall away from their projected graduation date around the sixth grade.

“Third grade is a kind of pivot point,” said Donald J. Hernandez, the study’s author and a sociology professor at Hunter College, at the City University of New York. “We teach reading for the first three grades and then after that children are not so much learning to read but using their reading skills to learn other topics. In that sense if you haven’t succeeded by third grade it’s more difficult to [remediate] than it would have been if you started before then.”

Communities In Schools doesn’t wait for a teenager to be on the verge of dropping out to provide him or her with vital services like academic support, counseling, food and clothes. We work with students from kindergarten through senior year of high school to make sure they never feel like they’re on a precipice. Our site coordinators make sure children have mentors, health care, social workers, after-school programs and whatever else they need to help them do well in school and graduate on time.

In fact, Communities In Schools’ five-year evaluation results confirmed the success of our model at not only reducing dropout rates and increasing graduation rates, but resulting in a higher percentage of students reaching proficiency in 4th-grade and 8th-grade level reading and math.

By doing our best to identify students struggling in the classroom early on, Communities In Schools prevents kids from falling off the edge and becoming dropout statistics.