WHY STRUGGLING STUDENTS?

UNDERRESOURCED SCHOOLS DIMINISH OUR STUDENTS AND COMMUNITIES

While many opinions exist about how resourced a public school should be, we know that in schools without resources, some students will fall through the cracks. Today, schools are in a dramatic state of change. With research and innovation, they can evolve into safe centers of learning and empowerment. We can also design schools so that they align with parent’s work realities and schedules, creating family-friendly environments that serve students, staff and parents.

Tomorrow’s public schools will be the key frontline defense against many of the challenges facing students and their families, including health disparities. Every school can become what’s called a community school, which means they are funded and staffed to become vital community hubs for health care, food distribution, clothing banks for the needy, and places of important community resources and information in case of a public health and safety crisis. This will only happen, however, if they have the resources, staff and the know-how to do the job. The community school model makes sense especially in times of crisis and change, because schools are the one place that even kids in the most dire of circumstances somehow manage to get to most of the time. 

The more fully-funded services we can pack into schools, the better: afterschool and summer programs, mentoring programs, social workers, case managers, employment centers, medical, reproductive and behavioral health services, and on-site tutoring. While coordinating and creating the funding streams for all these services may sound like a huge challenge, successful community school models have been in existence for quite awhile. Some already are performing this type of comprehensive, family-focused and student-centric programming for decades. The results are higher retention and higher graduation rates, as well as overall higher satisfaction from students and their parents.

We take on a very complicated system with numerous challenges. We provide an overview of the community school model within the public education system to demonstrate ways to address these issues. Get ready to be inspired. When a state has a networked system of fully-resourced community schools, our communities have the capacity to be healthier and safer, along with the resources to increase the success of all students. We will guide you through all the steps needed for transforming currently under-resourced schools into fully-resourced community schools.

In the Center for Community Schools@100% we seek to get to real-world solutions. We will guide you through all the steps needed to put ideas and gain buy-in for the model.

What are the root causes of the lack of community schools in the US?

Given we’re living in an epidemic of childhood trauma, why wouldn’t every public school now be funded to support all students with access to behavioral health, along with dental, medical care and tutors. The list is a long one.

Some root causes may include:

• People believe that schools are for teaching the basics, not providing emotional support and health care.
• We expect students (and their parents) to fix themselves if they face challenges with mental health, substance misuse and lack of resources.
• We think that if families need help with community services they should just pay for it, not receive it at school.
• Some think that it’s not the job of government to help traumatized students and their struggling parents through school services.
• People think that public schools can never find funding to become community schools.
• There are those that say, “Facing ACEs can be character-building.” With this belief, there’s certainly not a need to help students who live in households where abuse, neglect, substance misuse, domestic violence and untreated mental health challenges are the norm.
• As for why we need to transform our regular public schools into full service community schools, where students and their parents can access the support they need to increase school achievement, the answers are easy to identify.

“Do school classrooms really need to be more than one teacher, thirty desks with four walls? That’s all I had and I turned out fine.”

For students with ACEs, many will become marginalized as their fear of what awaits them at home far outweighs the pressure to study and achieve. Community schools are designed to offer the support needed for all students to thrive and succeed. The model also provides parents with the support needed to address ACEs. We know from child welfare data that most parents engaged with child protective services will be struggling with one or more of the following challenges: substance misuse, domestic violence and mental health challenges. Most parents have difficulty accessing help.

Sometimes, services don’t exist. Other times, parents are not aware of them or how to access them. Again, the community school model provides the staff and resources to engage with students and family members in significant ways, to ensure safer and healthier home environments, where learning is prioritized.

Who’s learning, who’s falling behind and who will fail?

We could overwhelm you with data on national and state public school attendance, grade averages and drop-out rates. What’s most important is that you paint a picture of the schools in your county. The 100% New Mexico Survey will tell you what parents and youth have to say about their access to schools that have resources. You can also compare and contrast graduation rates with schools in higher and lower income communities, as well as look at the difference between public and private schools.

One thing we can assure you, if a school district were to survey their students for ACEs, it would be a wake-up moment for the entire county. From the very small samples we have, a third to two-thirds of some public classrooms have students reporting three or more ACEs. And surveys from private schools would also make the story complete, documenting to what degree students of all socio-economic levels are enduring ACEs and the problems resulting from the pressure of attaining high scores, including substance misuse and emotional health challenges.

How does student marginalization happen?

Why would students be marginalized because of ACEs and trauma? The list is a long one. First, as we have discussed throughout the book, we have students flooding into the schools having endured (or enduring) trauma. 

Students fall through the cracks for many reasons. While a school may call itself trauma-informed, this does not mean that the school has a school-based wellness center with full time behavioral health care staff, along with medical and dental care. Yes, staff may be able to acknowledge the students with high ACEs scores and be sympathetic to their situation. Outside of offering the occasional lessons on sharing feelings, however, students with ACEs in most standard public schools are on their own. School staff and teachers must often tread very, very carefully as they talk with students about their home lives, lest it mean potential abuse or neglect is revealed, requiring a call to Child Protective Services.

Teachers are in an impossible situation

In some schools, if staff reported all the students being potentially maltreated at home to child welfare, large segments of some classrooms would be meeting with child protective services investigators. School would cease to function.

So teachers and staff, who care deeply about students (or they would not be in education) turn a somewhat blind eye to students with ACEs in order to survive the day and do the best they can for all students. Many students with ACEs follow the school rules, doing their best while dreading going home to suffer in silence day after day, year after year. This scenario can change with a community school and a countywide effort to ensure vital family services.

Data Guides Action

Fast forward to your reality today: With data from the 100% New Mexico Survey and other sources, you have a good idea about where the need for community schools may exist in your county, and that’s why it’s difficult to access for families. While global, national and state data on community schools are very interesting and instructive, the real data that informs your work are generated by your 100% New Mexico initiative work diving deep into local neighborhoods and school districts. That said, you may be surprised by your survey results and learn that a challenge is far bigger or smaller or more localized than you originally thought.

But wait, google says there are answers!

With literally millions of people reading articles on ending education and health disparities disparities and thousands of foundations, governmental and non-governmental organizations focusing for decades on supporting student safety and success, why is access to community schools still so prevalent across fifty states? Why might a single mom, showing signs of trauma, not be aware of how helpful a community schools with behavioral health care services could be? Why don’t all parents of school-age children know about the benefits of the community school model? Why might a parent with involvement with child protective services not automatically be linked to a community school with a school-based health center? In a pandemic, can we afford to have any student or parent without a way to access a school-based medical center that can test and treat family members? 

We don’t mean to question our good-hearted leaders in political, academic and philanthropic circles, but there appears to be a complete disconnect between those who claim to have answers and the actual implementation of solutions to ensure 100% of our residents are able to access community schools? What are our morals, ethics and values that allow lack of the services community schools can offer, including strengthening families and keeping students safe from ACEs, to exist amid so much abundance?

What kind of society would allow a policy of benign neglect to doom entire zip codes to lack of fully-resourced community schools?  Why should our most vulnerable parents ever endure anxiety about raising a child without help from family support specialists working in a community school? If we ever needed a public and private sector solution to lack of community schools, this is the moment.

Truly, why are we all not asking in loud public forums, “What is the root cause of under resourced schools impacting our urban and rural communities in the US?”

Community schools are what we call a “thriving service” (alongside our services for survival). In our 100% New Mexico initiative, we focus on ensuring community schools across a county, serving all the communities within its borders.  Simply put, problems related to student’s education and health disparities can generally stand in the way of a safe childhood, high academic achievement and high functioning, self-sufficient family. 

Our best bet for addressing a host of challenges related to early disparities is ensuring that community schools are fully supported.