Supporting Cross-System Partnerships to Improve Student Outcomes by Removing Barriers

Supporting Cross-System Partnerships to Improve Student Outcomes by Removing Barriers to Academic Success:

Office of School/ Community Partnerships and the Healthy Community Incentive Fund

Submitted by Melissa Mitchell on behalf of the Federation for Community Schools

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.

On behalf of our 1400+ members, 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.

Illinois has the largest number of community schools in the country. There are more than 225 schools in Illinois that identify as community schools – with many more partnerships interested in started this work. As collective impact efforts take root in more and more communities, and as districts start to implement the provisions of the Every Student Succeeds Act, Illinois can expect to see increased interest in and commitment to undertaking community school work as well as more programmatic partnerships between schools and community partners and districts and community systems.

In addition to locally-driven efforts, the state has put a priority on creating greater access to family supports and behavioral health services, using community-level partnerships to better streamline access to supports using, oftentimes, schools as hubs of access. All of these efforts are working to create greater alignment between community systems and schools with the goal of increasing access to supports, services and resources for students and families.

Illinois has an opportunity to support and strengthen existing and developing community school initiatives, collective impact efforts and school/ community partnerships by establishing an Office of School / Community Partnerships. Because of the work that these partnerships are doing to connect community resources to families and the priority that the state has put on increased efficiency in access to Department of Human Services (DHS) supports, this Office would be across both DHS and ISBE. It would focus on administration, support, quality and accountability, including identifying, highlighting, replicating and supporting strategies that improve access to services and supports, using schools and other community spaces as hubs (such as the community school strategy and efforts like the United Way’s Neighborhood Networks and East Side Aligned).

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 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).
• Providing districts with necessary support to engage families and communities in meaningful planning around ESSA.
• 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 to learn from and replicate.
• 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 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 and play a role in 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.

The benefits to the state in creating this Office would center on maximizing opportunities to connect families and students to services and supports by providing school/ community partnerships with the structure they need to be successful.

1. Invest in the Healthy Community Incentive Fund

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.”

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 would also like to see this funding start going to targeted districts as soon as possible.

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.

On behalf of our 1400+ members, I respectfully ask that the Illinois State Board of Education allocate the FY17funds as soon as possible. We also ask that ISBE create a Healthy 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.

In order for children and young people to reach their fullest potential, they need to have holistic academic and positive youth development experiences. Akin to how a symphony is comprised of many different instruments playing in concert, children must have different kinds of learning opportunities and supports in order to master academic and life skills. Similarly, just as a symphony requires that each musician be able to integrate his or her piece with the larger orchestra, children are best able to thrive (both academically and socially) in environments where they have access to opportunities that are integrated with each other, but that offer new ways to experience learning and that support their development.

Investments in programs like a Healthy Community Incentive Fund are important because they provide opportunities for communities to organize themselves, develop a shared vision of success, and harness local resources to remove academic barriers to non-academic success. Everyone benefits when a community works together to foster the potential of its youth and families. All over Illinois, school districts, community partners and local businesses are aligning their efforts around a more comprehensive vision of success for children and young people. In order to be successful in creating sustained collaborations that maximize community resources in efficient ways and make sure they are accessible to students and families, districts and their partners need support to develop a shared vision of success, organize themselves and implement a strategy for access to programs and resources. The Healthy Community Incentive Fund would provide this support. The goal is to fund capacity building and alignment of efforts that yields greater access to and integration of resources – not to fund a program.

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.

The Healthy Community Incentive Fund should be across DHS and ISBE because this level of collaboration would foster community-level alignment. In addition, the state has prioritized increasing access to a range of supports and looking at how schools can be hubs of access for children and families. Developing a Healthy Community Incentive Fund across both agencies would mean that piloting strategies like putting DHS case managers in schools would have state-level coordination behind them. Furthermore, children are part of family systems, and changing outcomes for children (including academic outcomes) is often a function of addressing challenges their families may be facing. Housing the Healthy Community Incentive Fund in both DHS and ISBE would further represent a dual-generational approach to improving outcomes for youth.

Despite 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 built 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 positive 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.

Without a state investment in supporting community-level investments, districts and community partners face challenges in forming cohesive, sustained collaborations. 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.

ILLINOIS STATE BOARD OF EDUCATION

100 NORTH FIRST STREET

SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS 62777-0001

FY 2018 BUDGET HEARING