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United Way President and CEO Bill Kitson and the agency will spend $2.5 million this year to place a social services coordinator in 25 Cleveland schools. The school district and United Way announced today that eight of the new schools have picked agencies to partner with.
(Plain Dealer file photo)
CLEVELAND, Ohio – Eight more Cleveland schools have named social service agencies to start organizing tutoring, attendance drives, parent engagement and other services for students and families.
The eight are the second wave of "wraparound" schools sponsored by the United Way of Greater Cleveland and the Cleveland school district to have an agency partnering with the school. Just as with the schools that had wraparound services last year, each will have a full-time service coordinator working inside the school, interacting with students every day.
After working with one school each during last school year, Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Play House will start work with two more schools each this year. The University Settlement and Burton, Bell, Carr Development Inc., who worked with a school last year, will each work with a second school this year.
And Cuyahoga Community College and the Neighborhood Leadership Institute are joining the effort.
All eight of the new schools are in this year's crop of "Investment Schools" – struggling schools that the district has targeted for extra help to improve.
One – East Technical High School – already had a partnership set up separately last year with the nearby Friendly Inn Settlement. The last of the 10 new Investment Schools, Patrick Henry elementary school, has yet to pick a partner.
See the full list of schools and partners below.
District and United Way officials have said since they launched the program last year that their goal is to better connect each school with their communities – churches, businesses, non-profit agencies – so that students and families have the support of the whole neighborhood.
It's a model that borrows heavily from the "community learning centers" in Cincinnati and the "community school" movement nationwide. Gov. John Kasich pointed to Cleveland's wraparound efforts in his State of the Union speech this year as the kind of program meeting goals of his youth mentorship program, Community Connectors.
Cleveland schools Chief Executive Officer Eric Gordon and United Way CEO Bill Kitson said that they have only anecdotal evidence so far of the program helping students. Agencies were named mid-year last school year, so the site coordinators" – the people working full time in the schools – only had a few months.
Gordon said he is cautious about being too quick to give credit to the program, or assign it blame. But Gordon said that discipline issues – detentions and suspensions - were lower at Jamison and Mound elementary schools and at Collinwood and Lincoln-West high schools – all wrapround schools, last year.
And he said he is seeing better attendance at Grdina elementary and at Lincoln-West.
Gordon said a major goal this year will be improving attendance. Schools and agencies are running attendance awareness campaigns that include knocking on parents' doors and calling students' homes to urge parents to have their children in school.
The agencies have set up other services since joining schools last year. Juliana Cole, education programs associate for the United Way, said the West Side Community House had volunteers tutor students at H. Barbara Booker elementary last year during their lunch period.
Lisa Baskin, who runs the wraparound program for the district, said that the Bellaire-Puritas Development Corporation helped bring an author to R.G. Jones elementary school last year to visit students.
And the Cleveland Play House, which started a partnership with Jamison elementary last year, invited families to three plays at the Play House last year, in addition to other services. Kevin Moore, managing director of the Play House, said he plans to start a theater program at the school this year.
The Play House even went a step further for Jamison. When the MC2STEM High School that partners with General Electric and the Great Lakes Science center needed an arts program, the Play House offered GE a trade – bring a new science program to Jamison and the Play House would bring theater to MC2STEM.
All of the schools will have community meetings early this fall so parents can say what they want out of the new site coordinators for their schools, to help the agencies pick the coordinators.
The United Way has budgeted $2.5 million for the program this year, Kitson said, or about $100,000 for each of the 25 schools. The district contributes $700,000 to the project and $200,000 comes from the United Way's general budget.
Kitson said that the remaining $1.6 million comes from donations to the wraparound program, from foundations and companies including Key Bank, Third Federal bank, the Jewish Federation of Cleveland, Mt. Sinai Health Care Foundation, Saint Luke's Foundation, the Thomas White Foundation, Park Ohio and the Cleveland Browns Foundation.
The schools (all K-8 except where noted) and partners are:
Adlai Stevenson, Cleveland Play House
Almira, Cleveland Play House
Bolton, Case Western Reserve University
Fullerton, University Settlement
George Washington Carver STEM, Burton, Bell, Carr Development Inc.
Glenville HS, Neighborhood Leadership Institute
Marion-Sterling, Cuyahoga Community College
Michael R. White STEM, Case Western Reserve University
Patrick Henry, TBA