Communities In Schools of Washington News

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.

Washington, DC – Communities In Schools, the nation’s leading organization dedicated to empowering students to stay in school and achieve in life, today released the results of a five-year comprehensive longitudinal evaluation, conducted by one of the nation’s foremost social science evaluation firms.

After five years of detailed evaluation underwritten by The Atlantic Philanthropies—comparing the results to over 1,600 studies screened by the Department of Education’s What Works Clearinghouse—the evaluation concluded that the Communities In Schools model resulted in the strongest reduction in dropout rates of any existing fully scaled dropout prevention program that has been evaluated; that Communities In Schools is unique in having an effect on both reducing dropout rates and increasing graduation rates; and that the Communities In Schools model is effective across states, school settings, grade levels and student ethnicities. Also, analyses indicate that the more fully and carefully the model is implemented, the stronger the effects.

“The Communities In Schools model is a powerful tool to help turn around low performing schools. In partnership with teachers, principals and superintendents, Communities In Schools is achieving impressive results in some of the most economically disadvantaged areas of our country,” said Dan Domenech, executive director, American Association of School Administrators.

The results from the evaluation are already being translated into improved service delivery by Communities In Schools local affiliates. Based on the mid-point results from the Implementation Study and the Quasi-Experimental Study, Communities In Schools codified a set of program and business standards that the research revealed had the greatest effect on student improvement, and then drove those practices back into the network through an accreditation process. Approximately 108 affiliates have been accredited or are in the process, with all affiliates on track for accreditation by 2015.

“The research findings have fueled an even greater sense of urgency within our network – a commitment that we need to bring the strongest, most evidence-based and rigorously evaluated practices to the young people we serve, and that we need to do it immediately,” said Daniel Cardinali, president of Communities In Schools.

The final evaluation report is available at: http://www.communitiesinschools.org/about/publications/

Statement by Communities In Schools National President Daniel Cardinali

Arlington, Va. – Communities In Schools applauds President Obama for reaffirming in the State of the Union address that every child deserves a chance to succeed. The President called out the nation’s dropout rate as a barrier to our prosperity and security. We agree. In communities across the country we are partnering with local elected officials, school superintendents, principals and teachers to reform failing schools, and close the achievement gap.

While the American economy struggles to recover from the recession, state and local governments, the primary funders of education, are particularly challenged. As government at all levels looks to make cutbacks, we must preserve funding for the programs that serve young people at risk of not graduating. We strongly support President Obama’s pledge to “not make cuts on the backs of our most vulnerable citizens.”

Tonight the President said of Americans, “We do big things.” In 3400 schools nationwide, working with 1.3 million young people and their families, Communities In Schools does big things – helping kids at risk achieve in school and succeed in life.

We are grateful for the President’s continued leadership on closing the achievement gap, and proud to be the nation’s leading dropout prevention organization and the only one proven to both decrease dropout rates and increase graduation rates.