Episode 12: Community Matters

The Community School model gives students access to everything from work-based learning to tutoring and other types of support. In this episode, Lauren Campion, Education Administrator  of Lowell Public Schools, shares how partnerships with local organizations are allowing students, particularly those deemed at-risk, to take advantage of resources they might otherwise not get. Hear for yourself why the Community School model works, and how it can be replicated. 

For more information on the Community School model, visit: https://sites.google.com/view/community-school-model/home

Transcript

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Announcer:

You're listening to the Voices In Education Podcast powered by Securly, where we hear from new voices and explore new ideas about how we can reimagine education to support whole student success. Education is at an inflection point. As we grapple with complex challenges like funding and enrollment, as well as diversity, equity, and safety, we also have an opportunity, an opportunity to reimagine education. Now more than ever, we know the importance that students’ overall wellbeing plays in their success. They need to feel supported and safe and connected to be able to engage in their learning and achieve their full potential. Join your host, Casey Agena, a former teacher turned instructional coach and technologist, as he interviews inspirational educators, school leaders, wellness professionals, and more to amplify their voices. You'll learn about the innovative work they're doing to support student safety, engagement, and overall wellness. And who knows, you may even spark a new idea of your own. Ready to reimagine education? Let's go.

Casey Intro:

I'm your host Casey Agena and in today's episode, we are talking about the community school model Lauren Campion, long time friend she's been a catalyst for much of the changes that were really needed in the Lowell Public Schools Community which is located just outside of Boston. We're going to hear about what work that she's done to really enable the school, the community, parents, and students to work together to address the needs that many of them had particularly around student wellness. Welcome Lauren, and glad to have you here.

Lauren:

Thanks for having me here, Casey.

Casey:

So we had a great discussion pre-show about your work and about community schools and why they're so important, and particularly in your community. So help us out a little bit. What is a community school and what role does it play in your community?

Lauren:

So the community school model is an educational strategy to support students and families and community members to thrive, as you said. So it transforms the school into a hub for neighborhood services, in a few areas, health and wellness, post-secondary readiness, and enrichment programming after school. And it does this by engaging the local partners as resources. So agencies who their sole focus is to provide wellness services, health services, career services. They are leveraged by the school district to provide those services on site at the school. And this helps address out of school barriers that students may have that hinder their success in the classroom and just sets the stage for them to be more successful in school.

Casey:

So what do you talk about partners and community partners, who are they, particularly in Lowell, and why is it important for them to say like," Hey, we want to be a partner with Lowell Public Schools and this community school model?"

Lauren:

Sure. Well the goal of partnering, why they want to be partners with us, is because we all have the same overarching goals that we have successful, productive, engaged community members here in Lowell. So the partners that we work with, we have nonprofit partners, we have a mentoring partner who provides during and after school support for students to guide them along their path to their diploma and sets them up for next step post-secondary based on their interests. We have an urban farming partner that has school gardens where students can learn how to grow their food and learn culinary skills to prepare healthy snacks. Families can receive free shares of the crops during the growing season and community members can actually rent a plot at these school gardens to have a space to grow things, which is not as common in an urban environment.

We also have the local job career center who helps students get internships during school, part-time paid jobs and internships outside of school hours and through the summer months where we know that sometimes engagement in education can start to fall off without that structured school environment. So those are a few of our partners, we have close to 20 partners now. We have a bike program that helps students and adults get to and from school and work. So all sorts of different opportunities that already exist in the community, but we create formal partnerships to bring them to serve the students at our schools.

Casey:

And the target audience, in terms of the students you identify that really need this type of model, how are they identified? Or is it for everybody in Lowell Public Schools? Is it both, is it either? How does that work?

Lauren:

Sure. So I think that the end goals, it's a universal strategy that reaches all students, but we do have ways to identify tiers of risk. We have social emotional screenings and we have teacher or social work staff referral set up where they say, "Oh, this student, they can't see the white board. Their grades have been slipping, so could you hook them up with our vision partner?" And then we'll have a vision van come to the school periodically to do an eye exam and give prescription glasses for free to students. So that sort of thing. The identification process it's comprehensive. There are different ways for students to be identified as in need of support. And then of course we like to have as much family awareness as possible. We give information out on the different programs we provide and have people opt in to them as well.

Casey:

And this model that is employed at Lowell Public Schools is not unique. I mean there's models that vary, yet are similar across the country, correct?

Lauren:

Absolutely, yes. So there are not as many community schools up in Massachusetts, but there are whole states that employ this strategy at a state education policy level. We work with the federal government who provides grants to communities to implement partnerships, community school services at their schools as a strategy for school improvement. And we also have partnered with folks in other states who are doing the same work as us. The Harlem Children's Zone actually was all the way back in the seventies, and that was the inspiration of the community school model, as I understand it. Been going on for a while, especially in these urban areas with high poverty.

Casey:

So little personal question then, how did you get started in this? What was the thing that got you committed to this, working at Lowell Public Schools,* how did you get in here in the first place?

Lauren:

Well, I took an interest to community schools, I don't know, eight or nine years ago when I was in graduate school at Brown University's Urban Education Policy Program. We studied it as an educational strategy in class, and there was actually a local initiative going on in Providence at the time. So that's how I became familiar with it. And I just thought it really clicked for me because there are barriers that students face outside of the classroom that can dictate their trajectory, educationally, that students from more affluent communities don't face. They might have access to all of the wraparound services and enrichment services already just by virtue of being born into privilege. So I thought that if education is truly a public good, we need to broaden our strategy and really leverage the many resources at our disposal, who also have the goal of supporting communities with more economic struggles.

Casey:

Got it. So we had talked a little bit about that idea of at risk, students at risk, and really services to support those particular students. And I think there's many definitions to that term, at risk, from a lot of different people. How do you all define at risk, and what do we mean by that, particularly in your community in Lowell?

Lauren:

Sure. I would define at risk as students who are on a path to not completing high school, and this can be based on various indicators. You could see chronic absenteeism, which has risen across the country during the pandemic, as a result of a disconnect from school. Students are not engaged at the same levels that they were pre-pandemic, due to the break in education, remote learning, economic hardship that their families might be facing, a pull of employment, lots of jobs available for young teenagers that might be more enticing at the moment than finishing their education, so all those indicators which would put a student on a path to dropping out. So that's what we would define as at risk. And I think that you could see that all the way down in middle, elementary school level just through absences, grades, behavior, social emotional scales, that are self-report or that staff report on

Casey:

You touched upon it, so we'll open up that Pandora's box about pandemic, and COVID. We know across the country as we're seeing schools kind of open up face to face, we're seeing services being able to really meet with families and whatnot, a little bit more broadly. Looking at the past 24 months, let's say in the past two years, how did that affect the students and families that you serve? I think there was a way that you did it pre-pandemic and then you had to shift things around, and then now it's in the different phase of that. So what has that look like in the short 24 month timeline, with your work?

Lauren:

Well, it's definitely been a challenge, that's for sure. Immediately we pivoted, like the rest of the world, to remote based services in the early pandemic, March 2020. And since then, of course we've reopened, we've been able to get some of those in-person services back. But we have seen just what's kind of left with the landscape of student engagement and school connectedness at an all time low, at least in my experience with this district. So I think long story short, throughout the pandemic we saw greater need for these types of wraparound services. We saw some success, especially with our partners who have that direct positive adult relationship arc that had already been established with our students, students who were not interested in going to online classes or just feeling hopeless and trying to ride out the end of a pandemic that never came. And just having our partners reengage them, say, "Look, you can do this. This is what you have to do. We can help you with a job, we can help you earn your money right now, but you also need to focus on getting these credits."

So we were lucky to have already a blended learning platform that we've used and an online remote tutoring program by our school staff, supported by our various partner agencies. So we were successful in engaging, we actually had a record number of students graduate through our engagement center program, which is an alternative program here that does a hybrid tutoring for competency based credit recovery. We had about 70 students or so graduate through that last year, about 9% to 10% of the district senior class graduated through it. So we were well positioned to serve increased need, but the need is still there, it's vast. And we are relying on our partners to find creative ways to reengage students now more than ever.

Casey:

And probably increasing too as we look whereas closing out the school year, going into the summer. You mentioned a little bit about the blended learning and the online aspect of your work. Was that new? Is that something that you always had in place in terms of helping the students graduate and getting them what they needed from a learning aspect? Or is that something that was already there?

Lauren:

It was put in place when our alternative high school, the Career Academy became a community school in 2015. So that was part of our initial scope of work with the community school program. We added an after school and evening remote hybrid type of tutoring program for competency based credit recovery. So thankfully we already had the structure and the capacity and the experience to respond to this growing need. It was exponentially growing during the pandemic, students needed this type of extra support.

Casey:

So you also support, from almost like a help desk kind of side of things, with the families and the students as well with what they need. Access-

Lauren:

Not as broad as a help desk role. We have students who are identified as at risk of dropping out who can't attend the traditional school day. They're absent, they're working, they might be pregnant or parenting. They just have barriers to attending traditional 7:30 AM 2:30 PM school. So that program existed back then on a smaller scale for those students who just needed to finish their high school diploma in a flexible way. So we were able to meet that need. And then of course, greater numbers of those students were referred to us during the pandemic.

Casey:

One piece that we talked about earlier, and I want to highlight for everyone listening in, was with our 21st century kids and students that we work with, access to learning and teaching and something where they're progressing towards graduation is one thing. Another piece of that is how they communicate, how they connect, maybe not necessarily with us, but definitely with each other. And I think that has almost been amplified a little bit during the pandemic, they really needed to connect. If they are at risk and that some of those students are falling through the cracks, but there's indicators out there of needing help, and it's might be through a peer, maybe it's through another social media platform or something like that where we're getting these.

How does that play in terms of activity of students when they may be off the grid a little bit, but where we're seeing some of these breadcrumb trails online of their students, where they are, who they're connecting with. How much of that plays into, I guess, being complimentary eyeballs, I guess, to knowing where students are, how they're doing, if they are in trouble, does that play a role in your work or your team on identifying kids?

Lauren:

Absolutely. So I would say that you need to have a school environment in place where students have at least one positive adult support that they can go to. Whether that's a school staff, for example, the social worker would be the first staff that would come to mind as being in tune with student social emotional health. But in addition, we have the complimentary supportive partners, mentors, the career center pathways coach, who is working with a student to get them a job. Anyone might hear things or might be informed by a student who is bringing to their attention a peer concern.

So whoever is the first person in the network of support who hears this would communicate with the team, of course with appropriate releases and everything, and set a plan of action into place. We have school based counseling services as part of the community school model that we're hoping to deepen this coming year because of the increased need. But I would say that identification, the most important thing is that somebody in this network of supports hears it and then is able to then respond with a team approach. And just really identifying what the most acute need is, what the priority need is for that student to find some relief.

Casey:

We have a number of educators and student wellness providers and number of folks working with children and students in schools across the country, across the globe, as part of our audience. If this is something that their school or their district, they're on the cusp of wanting to do this. How do they get started? They want to do this work, and maybe it's talked about, and we're seeing a lot of need and also a lot of money, as well, available through COVID response and stimulus money. What would be your advice to a district or a school that's in, we know these wraparound services are helpful aspirationally, but now operationally, how do we start, how we get started on this?

Lauren:

Well, I would first recommend doing some basic research on the community school model, the essential four pillars of a community school model, seeing what's been done before, not trying to reinvent the wheel and look for local and state funding sources, because they're really increasing nowadays. So look for things like community schools, systems of support, integrated students of support, things like that that could support partnerships to respond to the priority needs of your specific localized community and then convene the team. So bring to the table to different stakeholders in the different fields. Career services, business leaders, healthcare providers, families, and community members are very important. And of course, our teachers who are the front lines, they see the need every day for seven hours right there in front of them.

So you want to hear what your localized community could benefit from the most. And then you also want to ground it in some broad strategy that's been proven to have effect, have strong impact on all sorts of indicators of school success. And then the last thing I'd recommend is you definitely need a school based resource coordinator. Could be called a community school manager or a specialist, but you do need a full time dedicated staff to do this model with fidelity, because that person would be coordinating and case managing all the various partnerships and student involvement in them.

Casey:

I want to highlight a couple of things that you spoke to, Lauren. One, helping us define “what is community schools,” because we hear about it, but may not really know what it is. And it was really great to hear about what's happening in Lowell. And that idea of at risk, that's another kind of term that we hear and we see, but what does it really mean? And then what are the solutions out there to help support those? And, if we want to get started on this and we know it works and we know that it's something that is needed, how do we get started? So Lauren, I want to thank you for your time lending your voice to Voices in Education and giving us an idea of your work. So thank you.

Lauren:

Thanks so much, Casey.

Announcer:

Thanks for tuning in to the Voices In Education Podcast powered by Securly, where we hear from new voices and explore new ideas about how we can reimagine education to support whole student success. If you enjoyed today's episode, we hope you'll consider subscribing to the podcast and sharing it with others who would benefit from listening. Even a small act of support helps us reach more people and make a bigger impact. For the resources from today's episode and additional details about the podcast, please visit www.securly.com/podcast. Until next time, thanks for listening.