A Summer Melt Update

Last year, the Summer Melt Action Team (part of the All In! coalition) made their first attempt to increase the rate of Hartford Public Schools (HPS) students enrolling in college in the fall immediately following their graduation. After selecting and intervening with a cohort of 127 students from the class of 2017, that rate increased by three points over the previous year, to a new high of 61%.

And with assistance from researchers at the University of Connecticut, this year’s team is striving for a larger impact and greater rigor.

Following a proposal which has just cleared UConn’s Institutional Review Board—a body that ensures adherence to ethical research standards—the researchers are set to conduct focus groups of last year’s participants and outreach specialists to inform practice improvements for the coming year.

Following the focus groups (and a review of relevant academic literature and last year’s data), the UConn researchers will produce a practice manual to standardize the training of our outreach specialists and the intervention they deliver. One of the impending modifications to that intervention is that it will now be informed by principles of self-efficacy training. The precise nature of this is still to be determined, pending completion of the manual.

In the meantime, staff at the Hartford Consortium for Higher Education will be pursuing a recruitment goal of 200 students. For this, they will be working together with school counselors at HPS high schools. Counselors will use their access to data—and to the students themselves—to identify which students have been accepted to college and wish to attend, but are, in their professional opinion, at risk of not enrolling for the fall. The basics of this process were recently presented to the school counselors during one of their recent professional development sessions on February 20^th, to prepare them for the coming project.

Can We Be the Change We Seek?

“If students aren’t in school, they can’t learn.”

The diagnosis was simple; the fix for many students in Hartford’s North End facing particularly difficult conditions and challenges…less so. That is, until a group of pubic-private leaders and organizations came together to offer a solution to this problem of chronic absenteeism.

Poverty contributes to student absenteeism, because when a younger child has a half day or is sick, an older sibling must stay home to care for that child while the parents work. And yet, as we just noted, “if students aren’t in school, they can’t learn.”

Several years ago, Hartford’s major insurance companies offered entry level jobs to Hartford Public School graduates, but when they discovered that these young adults were unable to read at the level required, they had to do more than offer jobs.

So, these insurance companies adjusted their outreach to serve younger students, and a few of them launched a partnership between the Hartford schools and the private sector designed to reduce chronic absenteeism. In the three-year pilot program begun in the fall of 2016, mentors work with students in grades 3 to 8 at Simpson-Waverly School in Hartford’s North End.

Hartford administrators chose that school because a high concentration of its students come from economically disadvantaged homes and the principal embraced the idea as the right prescription.

With leadership from The Governor’s Prevention Partnership and funding from AmeriCorps, Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield and Cigna, a program called EdCorpsCT brings together 10 young adults, ages 18 to 24, to serve as mentors to 90 Waverly students each year. They’ve replaced the robo-calls that went out when a child was absent; instead, the young adult mentors call the home of every child late or absent every morning.

What happened next is the key…

A Skeptical First Look

Before exploring how private and public leaders came together to tackle absenteeism, some context.

Hartford is a small city with big ambitions.

Despite all our assets, we still struggle with how to transform our city into a healthy and thriving hub of businesses, public service institutions and community organizations that attract more residents, workers, and visitors to come and stay in Hartford year after year. Our budgets are shrinking and many communities are suffering. More parents and students are leaving our schools, more residents are leaving our communities, and more businesses are leaving our economy than we can bear if we are going to survive as a city not reliant on the state to save us every few years. But hope is not lost as there are many individuals and organizations throughout our city working hard each day to turn the tide.

For Achieve Hartford!, coordination of resources is the key. There is no hope for our city to become the talent hub we need it to be without intentionally creating space for increased alignment across all sectors.

For such a small city, we boast big assets to back up our ambitions.

Cheers for Early Successes

Getting back to our story… the 10 mentors serving 90 students were embraced by the entire school community as part of the fabric of the school.

In the first year of the program, absenteeism in the K-8 school fell by 9 percent, says Aristede Hill, program supervisor for EdCorpsCT. In addition, 67 of the students who received mentoring support increased their standardized test scores in math and literacy, he says.

To Jill Hummel, president and general manager of Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield of Connecticut and primary funder of the program, these early results are by design.  Having witnessed a successful model in Boston, she wanted to bring a similar program to Connecticut and the goal was to make sure this program was designed for both immediate impact on student wellness and efficiency in its use of resources.

Research shows that students who have a healthy relationship with at least one adult are more likely to attend school and graduate. Some of Simpson-Waverly’s students come to school worried about food, shelter and clothing, says Leoanardo Watson, school principal.

“School is not at the forefront of their mind. It’s: ‘How am I going to survive this environment I’m living in when I go home?’” Watson says. “We have a lot of children like that.”

The mentors, four of them HPS graduates, receive a modest stipend through an AmeriCorps grant to provide daily, one-on-one contact with their mentees. Before beginning work all mentors passed state and federal criminal background checks and received 40 hours of orientation and training.  The members receive additional professional development throughout the year.

Some of the mentors come from similar backgrounds as their mentees and they’re motivated to “make better people and better citizens,” Hill says. Each mentor has 10 mentees and spend at least 30 1:1 hours over the school year with each one. They mentor, provide academic support and tutoring, and engage with families.

Initially, teachers responded with skepticism to the idea and wanted to know if the presence of the mentors would add to their substantial workloads, Watson says.

“I presented this as an opportunity for the teachers and the young people they’re going to be working with,” he says. For example, the mentor could serve as an extension of the teacher, one day leading a small group in guided reading and another day putting up a classroom bulletin board. Overall, teachers have been pleased with the pilot program, Watson says.

Jill Spineti, president and CEO of The Governor’s Prevention Partnership, credited Watson’s leadership and support of the EdCorpsCT partnership with its success.

“Mr. Watson has been a champion and problem-solver,” Spineti says.

Although the intention was to help the Waverly students, the young adults working as mentors have learned job skills. Supervisors reminded mentees to avoid using their cellphones while working and to come to work dressed professionally.

Supervisors meet weekly with mentors and visit classrooms and observe them interacting with students. The supervisor acts as the liaison between the teachers and administrators and the mentors.

“I want the supervisors to talk directly to the teachers, asking ‘What is working; what do we need to tweak?” Watson says.

EdCorps mentors were given goals tied to the school’s improvement plan. It’s important for the mentors to feel a sense of purpose and that they’re part of a team, Watson says. Seeing the impact they’re having, some mentors volunteer to do more. Two young men volunteered to help coach a basketball team and a young woman volunteered to set up and lead a cheer squad.

When Simpson-Waverly School closes at the end of this school year, the partnership will transfer to another school, one with a high percentage of the Simpson-Waverly students. Watson says they’ve already met their goal because they’ve improved children’s lives, reduced chronic absenteeism and helped the mentees grow as young adults.

“We have seen children come into school with their heads down. They have the perception that they’re not good at school or they’re not smart,” says Spineti. “To see, at the end of the year, children holding their head up and being able to talk about what they’re learning – we’re so anxious to get this replicated and in more schools.”

As Hartford moves forward, this story of collaboration and shared leadership shines a flickering but welcome light of promise that our solutions might rise and meet the challenge of the obstacles before us. We look forward to sharing more stories of hope like this in the future with you.

Many of us may be familiar with the popular idiom, “a day late and a dollar short” by way of a personal experience. The heart ache from this teachable moment is tinged with a sense of injustice knowing that if you had only acted sooner, an opportunity for reward would not have been missed.

Richard Sugarman, Hartford Promise president, has seen this scenario play out with a particular group of Harford students he calls “Nearlies” — high school seniors who fall just short of meeting the criteria to qualify for a Hartford Promise scholarship. To be eligible, students need a cumulative attendance of 93% or better at a Hartford school; cumulative 3.0 GPA, and continuous Hartford residency from 9^th grade.   Witnessing Hartford students nearly miss this mark was a circumstance he was not willing to settle for and why he’s so thankful to the team of cross-sector leaders who have joined the Nearlies action team — one of three teams that drive the work of the All IN! coalition.

Designing the Intervention

The idea for the Nearlies action team was pitched last spring at the ALL IN! coalition’s stakeholder caucus.  Team members would convert Nearlies to Hartford Promise Scholars by identifying needs and providing effective interventions through mentoring, encouragement and support. A long-term goal is creating system change through a shift of expectations and behaviors, like data sharing between Hartford Public Schools and youth serving organizations who can provide additional college prep support and resources; or transparent reporting so parents and students can easily track their academic progress and attendance from year to year.

To help create an effective strategy, Daiana Lambrecht, Achieve Hartford!’s coalition organizer lead, assisted in recruiting diverse stakeholders to lead the work — Trinity College, Governor’s Prevention Partnership, Hartford Public Schools, Teach for America, and the City of Hartford.

Mentoring was identified as a key ingredient to supporting the Nearlies because of its research-backed, positive effects on students.

Building in communication tools and approaches for schools so they can better inform students will also take top priority for the team. Students who are knowledgeable of how close they are to gaining access to scholarships can be all the incentive they need to design their own interventions, like seeking out extra help or prioritizing school over social commitments.

The newly formed team will meet regularly to address key targets they need to hit over the next five months to make sure this intervention is successful.  They’ll also use this inaugural year as a baseline to learn about the other barriers preventing Hartford students from accessing post-secondary options and design the necessary solutions.

There is an opportunity to achieve change through this action-oriented approach. It begins with believing we can do more to improve educational attainment for Hartford kids.  It takes passionate advocates who see themselves in the solution. Are you All IN?

If you’re interested in being a mentor to a Nearlies student or serving on the action team contact Daiana, for more information: [email protected] .