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Improving Student Outcomes by Removing Barriers to Academic Success:

Supporting Cross-System Partnerships

Submitted by ______

November 18, 2016

  1. Create an Office of School/ Community Partnerships

The Illinois State Board of Education is working to build a “system whereby children are able to develop their interests, talents, and sense of self supported by schools and communities.” In order to most effectively ensure that students are support by schools and communities, the state needs structures in place to facilitate true partnership across community-level systems.

DESCRIBE BRIEFLY YOUR COMMUNITY SCHOOL, AFTERSCHOOL AND/ OR COLLECTIVE IMPACT WORK

I respectfully ask that the Illinois State Board of Education create an Office of School/ Community Partnerships that would establish the structure necessary to build long-term collaborations at the community level that can change outcomes for students.

Some activities of the Office of School/ Community Partnerships could include:

Administration & Funding –

  • Managing and providing oversight for grants that incentivize or prioritize community/ school partnerships.
  • Developing funding strategies and administering new grants that are aimed at supporting this work.
  • Facilitating access to data for districts, schools, communities and partners so as to direct state-level efforts and supports where they’re most needed in aligned and efficient manners.
  • Working with the Department of Human Services to oversee the Healthy Community Incentive Fund (see below), designed to seed and supporting promising cross-system/ cross-community partnerships that align resources to better support students and families.
  • Overseeing the Healthy Community Incentive Fund program (see below) and the grant programs for the 21st Century Community Learning Center and afterschool programs (including Teen REACH, currently managed by the Department of Human Services, and the afterschool budget line in the stopgap budget).
  • Identifying ways to braid existing funding streams, maximize potential new funding and make the most strategic use of Federal and state dollars.

Quality & Support –

  • Institutionalizing standards that districts and communities use to develop their work, including developing a Community Engagement Framework as a companion to ISBE’s Family Engagement Framework and adopting the national Community School Standards to guide community school work.
  • Creating consistent definitions and expectations of key roles in school/ community partnerships, including the Resource Coordinator/ Community School Manager, collective impact leadership roles and others who convene cross-systems work (i.e., Regional Offices of Education).
  • Connecting schools, community partners and joint partnerships to resources that can support their work – professional development, training, other state departments, best practices from the field.
  • Identifying and sharing information about efforts that can be held up as best practices examples for other communities and whose efforts can be replicated.
  • Identifying and/ or creating tools that school/ community partnerships can use to inform and strengthen their work (needs assessment and asset mapping tool kits, dashboards for organizing information and tracking outcomes).
  • Working with partners to provide professional development linked to Community School Standards, afterschool program quality standards and community and family engagement best practices.
  • Supporting districts in implementing the family and community engagement requirements of the Every Student Succeeds Act, including in developing plans for using funds and school improvement strategies.

Accountability –

  • Ensuring that school/ community partnerships are developing local-level outcomes and indicators that are connected to local priorities and state goals (i.e., Children’s Cabinet goals).
  • Managing a state-level evaluation process—source data from community schools, develop consistent indicators of quality implementation (based on the standards and on existing efforts, such as the self-evaluation and quality indicators work that the Community Schools Initiative team developed) and create a structure that school/ community partnerships can use to assess their level of development, course correct if needed and prioritize their efforts.
  • Using the national Community School Standards to develop a level-setting or certification process that would identify levels of development for existing community schools.
  • Developing a strategy for how the certification process would drive capacity building, play into funding strategies.
  • Building out a set of common, outcomes-driven expectations of community school work.
  • Supporting grant reporting and using a state-level evaluation effort to demonstrate outcomes of school/ community partnerships and target support where they will be most impactful.

There are structures in other states that Illinois can look at to inform this type of a cross-agency effort.

  • Kentucky’s Division for Family Resource and Youth Support Centers – FRYSCs are a school-based strategy to connect families and youth to services and supports they need to thrive (this is Kentucky’s community school initiative, in other words). The FRYSCs are administered by the state Department of Education but also funded by the Cabinet for Health and Family Services, and both departments share the role of overseeing and supporting the FRYSCs.
  • New York City’s Office of Community Schools – New York City has made a large investment in community school partnerships. The Office of Community Schools oversees and supports community school efforts, but also has in its portfolio other partnership-focused programs like the 21st Century Community Learning Center work.
  • West Virginia has put in place a state-level Community School Coordinator, and provides technical assistance to community schools and other kinds of partnerships through its Office of Specialized Services.

IN YOUR VIEW, HOW WOULD A STATE OFFICE OF SCHOOL/ COMMUNITY PARTNERSHIPS SUPPORT YOUR WORK?

  1. Invest in the Healthy Community Incentive Fund, Long-Term

Last year, the Illinois State Board of Education’s (ISBE) F17 budget request included “a new Healthy Community Incentive Fund, which would have supported a competitive grant process to help coordinate, align, and leverage efforts to solve complex social problems within communities aimed toward serving the needs of the “whole child.” The program was intended to enable school districts to take a lead role in cross-organization collaboration and become centers of collective impact and responsibility to the children of the community. Addressing these issues would help ensure that students are present, focused, and ready to learn in the classroom.”[i]

In the FY17 stopgap, ISBE included a $15m afterschool line, and plans are being put in place to allocate $12.5m of that funding via formula to districts to use with the same intent that the Healthy Community Incentive Fund had. The formula has been used to identify 90 districts that would be eligible for this funding.

We are very supportive of this funding, and are interested in the ways in which the funding will be allocated, including the formula used to determine eligibility, the 90 districts that might be able to access this funding, the accountability framework, the proposed timeframe for making grants available and the length of the grants.

We also encourage ISBE and the state to make this a long-term commitment to support these kinds of collaborative approaches to meeting the needs of the community, families, students and schools so as to positively impact academic performance and youth development.

I respectfully ask that the Illinois State Board of Education and the Illinois Department of Human Services collaborate on a cross-agencyHealthy Community Incentive Fund budget request of $15 million for FY18 to provide grants to enable school districts and community partners across the state to harness local expertise and resources and create community-level alignment around academic, youth development and health goals for children and young people. This line would build off of the afterschool line in the FY17 stopgap budget and would represent a long-term commitment to aligning community systems to remove nonacademic barriers to student success.

Investments in programs like a Healthy Community Incentive Fundare important because they provide opportunities for communities to organize themselves and harness local resources to remove academic barriers to non-academic success.

WHAT DOES THIS WORK LOOK LIKE IN YOUR COMMUNITY – BRIEF INFO ABOUT YOUR COMMUNITY SCHOOL WORK.

The result of efforts like those that could be supported by the Healthy Community Incentive Fund is a comprehensive and collaborative approach to youth development and academic success. Schools become the centers of vibrant communities, and districts become the centers of healthy community systems.

In spite of efforts underway in some communities – and state priorities to increase access to supports (including behavioral health services) – the state doesn’t currently invest in community-level alignment or collective impact activities. Communities that have been able to build out these partnerships and structures have had to do so without support from the state, and many have not been able to realize the promise of these kinds of collaborations because they lack the “seed funding” to start the work. The state needs to be a critical partner in these efforts, and has the opportunity to become one with the Healthy Community Incentive Fund.

In addition to academic and youth development outcomes, leveraging existing investments makes fiscal sense. Creating partnerships that enable families to access supports and services can yield a $1-$3 return on investments. The kinds of collaborations that the Healthy Community Incentive Fund would foster would also be mobilized to seek and access additional funding to support implementing the strategies they develop. From the Federal Full Service Community Schools grant program to United Way Neighborhood Network grants to being able to braid local funding together, cross-community alignments are best positioned to access and maximize these kinds of opportunities.

Without a state investment in supporting community-level alignments, districts and community partners face challenges in forming cohesive, sustained collaborations. This is not about funding a program – this is about funding the capacity to build out a strategy to harness community resources to remove non-academic barriers to academic success. With the Healthy Community Incentive Fund, Illinois has an opportunity to provide communities with the seed money they need to establish new collaborations that change academic, health and youth development outcomes for children and youth, and that move the state further towards achieving a comprehensive vision of success for all young people in Illinois.

[i] Source: January 12, 2016 Superintendent’s Newsletter