Achievement Gap Committee
Feb. 19, 2010
Keith Lester, superintendent
Julie Ha Truong, Community Schools Project Manager
Brooklyn Center School District
I hear the complaints from schools: “kids are coming to us with so many problems--hunger and abuse. How can you expect us to educate the kids?” UCLA Dept. of Psychology sent out an invitation to be on its list serve? Do you want to address barriers to learning in schools? That was right up my alley. Get beyond excuses and get down to addressing the needs of kids on an educational basis. How do we get barriers out of the way?
At Brooklyn Center, we began looking at the partnerships. We had 50 different partners, the U of M, YMCA. We have the making of a community school. Went to partners one at a time, saying, “we need your help. We are going to break down barriers.” What it does for education is key. What it does for partners is important, too. When we partner we reduce redundancy and create a higher quality program. We are taking resources where several groups were doing the same thing, we take them and spread them out.
Hennepin County was one of the first partners we had when we were trying to put the pieces together. … They provided help organizing it. County staff knew more about community schools than I did. They led us and reigned us in at time. …Achievement Plus in St. Paul is one of the places we went for a model. We know we are not reinventing the wheel. We are reinventing it to suit the needs of our population.
We had a student, one of the ELL students in the elementary school. The teacher said he was absolutely crazy. Behavior was an issue. He ended up in the hospital with numerous abscesses in his teeth. You could write a book. Got him to the dentist. He is behaving now because he isn’t suffering from pain.
Mission: “Strive to support academic, social and emotional development of students and families, and empower them to become caring and responsible citizens.” It’s broad. No one initiative is going to do it. It puts an umbrella over all these things and makes them talk to each other. I believe it is working. It is a community hub. It is open most of the time.
When we talk to potential partners, I tell them three things:
1) It has to be good for kids;
2) It can’t be self serving; and
3) If it can save or make money, that money goes back into the classroom or program.
We have Friday night programming for kids. In addition to games, it serves the whole child. It is collocated, it is coordinated and it is comprehensive. Not everything is on site, but a great deal of it is, or we make it accessible. It provides access to health and family resources, and education and support services to families and community members.
The research on community schools says they improve student learning, have higher attendance, and decreased mobility. With some of the things we have already implemented we have seen results. Four years ago our mobility rate was 33 percent today it is 26 percent. You can attribute it to a lot of things, I have to believe this is one of them. Increased parent and family involvement. It’s slow, but we are seeing some of that. We expect to see a lot more.
Improved school climate. Kids are healthier. They are not as testy, they are not fighting. They know that we care. We demonstrate not just in how we talk and the class, but in every way we relate to them. We decreased special ed referrals. You will see improved mental and physical health and strengthen the neighborhood.
Brooklyn Center has got a bad rap. Dangerous and tough. They have that reputation because they are broke and are in the hole. That is the challenge. …I bet we have fewer fights in our high school than yours. We had a reputation to get rid of. Brookdale is dying or dead, lots of closed stores.
The community school model can make it attractive to families. 2.8 square miles, 1800 students. We have two buildings, a PreK-6 and a 7-12 and an area learning center that is off site. We have 35 percent open enrollment, 72 percent poverty, 15 percent special ed. We are Minneapolis and St. Paul in miniature. (When I am in my whining mode, which isn’t very often, they get $2,000 more a kid than we do.)
We are $1.9 million in the hole. We are facing everything that could go wrong with budgets. We are looking how to move ahead. People say, “how are you going to pay for it?” I don’t know. 1) Build it and they will come. 2) Have faith. .. That is the attitude we have to have. Those kids are coming to school every day. And they have a right to expect the very best.
We went to work not just on collocated services, but collaborative planning among all the partners and coordinated referrals. One of our big partners is Big Brother/Big Sister. They have a full-time person in our elementary school. They use high school bigs as part of their program as well as adult mentors. … They said we have way more students who need mentors than the number of mentors we have. How can we work on it together? Life coaches came onto our doorstep. They heard about the community schools model. The director there had worked in our schools. A perfect partnership. In any other world, BB/BS and Life Coaches would have been competitors. Under the community schools model, we are encouraging them to work together.
Half of our students at elementary stay after school for an hour of targeted services or homework help and one hour of activities. We sat down with curriculum coordinators. How can we make sure we are teaching the kids similar discipline and having the same academic outcomes? Sometimes daytime learning, if that method isn’t working, after school is a great time to try a different method. So we have monthly teams for each of these major projects.
The other key partners we have are the YMCA. Also a 21st Century Grant at the high school.
For Family Resources, our major partner is CAPSH (Community Action Partnership of Suburban Hennepin.) They have a couple dozen different services, basic needs, emergency assistance, tax assistance, employment counselors, food assistance. They asked if they could be a lead partner in the family resource room. They provide two staff two days a week. They donated $20,000 of furniture to get family resource room started in the elementary and high school. Now we are working together to bring in other partners that seem to be a good fit, particularly for our diverse populations: Lao, Hmong, African and Latino organizations. We are opening our doors. If you need office space, come on in. We’ll provide the space if you provide your expertise.
Three key areas: Let partners see that community school isn’t just a program here or there. Not just health center or family resources. It is the whole picture, a philosophy of how we do school. Academics have to be tied to enrichment and wellness and supports.
Change has to come from the top. We have been able to be successful very quickly, because the superintendent and principals are on board.
Keith Lester: We are doing 7th and 8th grade gender-based classes in all the core classes. Another innovation that isn’t new. We are seeing some success, particularly in the 7th grade. In Kindergarten, we have one class of boys, an experimental deal. They did a comparison. You look at the level, the percentage score. The boys didn’t have those other distractions and we taught them the way boys need, a lot of activity. They need the music. People say they want more boys classes. There can and should be more girls classes.
I am pretty much the only district level administrator left. We have cut $8 M since 2001. We have no librarians. Bureaucracy in Brooklyn Center: I am it. A former superintendent would say, “because we are so small you can wake up with a good idea and have it implemented by noon. … Sometimes it is almost that fast.”
Julie Ha Truong: AVID program: Advancement Via Individual Determination, is a course we have, grades 9-12 for a few years. One of the first. Very successful. We had our first graduating cohort of 25. 100 percent graduated and onto post secondary. … The thing I like, they think of each other as a cohort. They challenge and support each other.
Every day they have a class with an AVID teacher to help kids get ready to be college bound. The students we focus on are the ones who might otherwise not have considered college but are doing OK academically. Next year we are expanding it to grades 7-8
Keith: A lot of students in athletics. They have 30-45 minutes of downtime. We have made it mandatory to go to a class and do your homework and be there and make sure you are caught up with your day-to-day classwork….. We have worked in homework help with athletics.
Family resource rooms are amazing. Right away when they opened, we had a room in each building and said it is yours. It is a public building. It belongs to the public. And if you have program and it is beneficial to kids, come on in. We have a clothing closet that is working. One family got help with energy assistance, saw what was going on and came back the next day and put clothing in the clothing closet.
We have this building, Community Corner, an old liquor store. It’s a family resource center, a small space right in the middle of the apartments, up on 69th and Humboldt. We have families coming and going. Guy was out in a heavy snow storm. He had a shovel, He said “I got bread from you yesterday, I want to shovel your sidewalks.” That is community.
Five years ago when I came there was a committee called Healthy Together NW convened by Park Nicollet Foundation taking about needs of children in NE Hennepin County. Someone said “we don’t have any community clinics in this area. We have high need and high poverty.” Mick Johnson, president of the foundation, said no one has ever stepped up. 2.5 years later, there is a 2,400 square foot health resources center with medical, dental and mental health services. Every child in Brooklyn Center has access to free or reduced cost services in all three areas. No insurance, no nothing. They have grants and other resources to make sure the children have the services. A retired board member from the Park Nicollet foundation, a former contractor, got donations, contractors and suppliers donated, $260,000 later .. we opened the facility. You walk down the hall in the high school .. you turn the corner and walk into the health resource center and you are in a clinic. … It is beautiful.
We no longer have the excuse that we can’t teach these kids because they have these barriers.
We are working on a referral system, working with staff not to identify students who might have mental health problems but to recognize behaviors that are different and let someone know.
Julie: Issues around sharing information and referring clients. This is the community schools model, what does it mean? They are now comfortable with the referral format we have. We are trying to simplify referrals for teachers. They don’t need to know all the partners. They need to know the three key people in the school to ask.
Community schools model are all very similar:
Keith: Initial results: Anyone can make the data look how they want to look. Average rate that went onto post secondary had been 45 percent. Last year it was 75 percent. This year it might be 45 percent again. All the initiatives .. the AVID program is outstanding … teen pregnancy prevention with Hennepin County. Some initial data says it is improving … Community/family involvement, we are seeing it …
We had 15 appointments back to back the first day the dentist was there.
Julie: Clothes closet has three families that come in every day, an average of 60 families a month.
Keith: Brooklyn Center is the poster child for defeated referendum. We have had six consecutive. We are $1.9 M in the hole. You can’t believe the passion in the staff. We understand poverty. We understand taxes. We get that part. How do we get that sense of community? Geoffrey Canada had two or three millionaires who funded everything …
We hope to be one of the next Baby’s Space sites. We want to start prenatal. We want to get after infancy, preschool, toddler on a much more coordinated basis. That is our next chunk. Some of it is dream. Some of it is real. We have leased the space. We can’t afford to remodel it yet. It is the right thing to do.
A: Keith: Kids are looking more at the technology related things. We live on grants. We have a television studio, a graphic arts studio, a dance studio, and a black box theater. Sustaining it is going to be our big job. The grant runs out. Music tech lab is the most popular class. In the media center, kids turned to the Education Assistant and said, “Wow, this is just like the rich kids school.” They are so appreciative.
Q: Obvious group to work with would be Apple?
A: I am going to the Apple leadership meeting next month.
Q: Leadership Council?
A: Half of the team is simply our largest partners: YMCA, CASH, 21st Century Coordinator, resource room lead partner, business rep, media, student, parents, some ethnic community representative, city mayor, city manager, police chief, and park and recreation director for the city. Probably about a dozen.
Q; Teams?
A: Each team ranges from 4 to 15. Assume the average is around 10. The Health Resource Center Team started at 10. Now every meeting has 30 people.
Q: You took responsibility … it worries me a little bit that the schools are taking responsibility for solving problems that other parts of society have failed on, which has been what we have been doing for 50 years. Have you had a chance to reflect on that, and what you would change in the other systems that affect kids.
A: We are not providing anything other than space, opportunity and access. A part of all of the things we are doing is to teach a level of self sufficiency. That Health Resource Center won’t deal with every problem they have. It will tell them it is important to take care of your teeth, and that you go to the doctor when you are not well.
My response is, if they don’t have it at all and we can make it accessible and teach them to access it themselves, that’s good. This can’t be a constant give away. This has to be a constant gift to each other. Discover why it is important to be part of your community.
Julie: Community schools is a philosophy for how community looks at youth development. In other states, it is not led by the school. It could be led by the county, it could be led by a library, some are led by another YMCA. They are still called community schools.
Q:
A: We sat with our community education person who does early childhood and said, “do we have programs for infants? What are we doing with prenatal?” Yeah, we did. But they were done by different organizations who never talked to each other. There was no continuity. We don’t know if they made it to the next level. We want to make something seamless. We think Baby’s Space will help us with that.
We lose parents because we don’t keep them engaged. We don’t hang onto parents. That is the dream. The medical space is open for infancy through high school.
Q
A: The Health Resource Center opened three weeks ago. What they are seeing discipline referrals, those kind of climate related things. If I had to pick something that we are not doing well on, it’s bring staff in. There are some that need to see the connections yet. We met with the elementary staff this morning to get that conversation going.
Julie: They were trained to do academics. This is new to them.
Keith: It isn’t perfect. We are enthusiastic. Some things we do well, others we have a long way to go.
Feb. 19, 2010
Keith Lester, superintendent
Julie Ha Truong, Community Schools Project Manager
Brooklyn Center School District
Click here to Download this meeting write-up (.doc)
Keith Lester
In many ways, this community schools deal is a no brainer. Schools are already doing a lot of this stuff.I hear the complaints from schools: “kids are coming to us with so many problems--hunger and abuse. How can you expect us to educate the kids?” UCLA Dept. of Psychology sent out an invitation to be on its list serve? Do you want to address barriers to learning in schools? That was right up my alley. Get beyond excuses and get down to addressing the needs of kids on an educational basis. How do we get barriers out of the way?
At Brooklyn Center, we began looking at the partnerships. We had 50 different partners, the U of M, YMCA. We have the making of a community school. Went to partners one at a time, saying, “we need your help. We are going to break down barriers.” What it does for education is key. What it does for partners is important, too. When we partner we reduce redundancy and create a higher quality program. We are taking resources where several groups were doing the same thing, we take them and spread them out.
Hennepin County was one of the first partners we had when we were trying to put the pieces together. … They provided help organizing it. County staff knew more about community schools than I did. They led us and reigned us in at time. …Achievement Plus in St. Paul is one of the places we went for a model. We know we are not reinventing the wheel. We are reinventing it to suit the needs of our population.
We had a student, one of the ELL students in the elementary school. The teacher said he was absolutely crazy. Behavior was an issue. He ended up in the hospital with numerous abscesses in his teeth. You could write a book. Got him to the dentist. He is behaving now because he isn’t suffering from pain.
Mission: “Strive to support academic, social and emotional development of students and families, and empower them to become caring and responsible citizens.” It’s broad. No one initiative is going to do it. It puts an umbrella over all these things and makes them talk to each other. I believe it is working. It is a community hub. It is open most of the time.
When we talk to potential partners, I tell them three things:
1) It has to be good for kids;
2) It can’t be self serving; and
3) If it can save or make money, that money goes back into the classroom or program.
We have Friday night programming for kids. In addition to games, it serves the whole child. It is collocated, it is coordinated and it is comprehensive. Not everything is on site, but a great deal of it is, or we make it accessible. It provides access to health and family resources, and education and support services to families and community members.
The research on community schools says they improve student learning, have higher attendance, and decreased mobility. With some of the things we have already implemented we have seen results. Four years ago our mobility rate was 33 percent today it is 26 percent. You can attribute it to a lot of things, I have to believe this is one of them. Increased parent and family involvement. It’s slow, but we are seeing some of that. We expect to see a lot more.
Improved school climate. Kids are healthier. They are not as testy, they are not fighting. They know that we care. We demonstrate not just in how we talk and the class, but in every way we relate to them. We decreased special ed referrals. You will see improved mental and physical health and strengthen the neighborhood.
Brooklyn Center has got a bad rap. Dangerous and tough. They have that reputation because they are broke and are in the hole. That is the challenge. …I bet we have fewer fights in our high school than yours. We had a reputation to get rid of. Brookdale is dying or dead, lots of closed stores.
The community school model can make it attractive to families. 2.8 square miles, 1800 students. We have two buildings, a PreK-6 and a 7-12 and an area learning center that is off site. We have 35 percent open enrollment, 72 percent poverty, 15 percent special ed. We are Minneapolis and St. Paul in miniature. (When I am in my whining mode, which isn’t very often, they get $2,000 more a kid than we do.)
We are $1.9 million in the hole. We are facing everything that could go wrong with budgets. We are looking how to move ahead. People say, “how are you going to pay for it?” I don’t know. 1) Build it and they will come. 2) Have faith. .. That is the attitude we have to have. Those kids are coming to school every day. And they have a right to expect the very best.
Julie Ha Truong
I was one of the partners Keith met with. I worked with a nonprofit that he wanted to work with. [Capacity Building Trainer for Organizations that work with youth at NWHHSC]The work got larger and larger. He finally said, Julie, could you come and help and map this out? We mapped out a list of 100 partners in our school. We said, do they feel they can be successful? Do they feel they are part of the school? Are they a true partner? Do the partners know who the other partners are?We went to work not just on collocated services, but collaborative planning among all the partners and coordinated referrals. One of our big partners is Big Brother/Big Sister. They have a full-time person in our elementary school. They use high school bigs as part of their program as well as adult mentors. … They said we have way more students who need mentors than the number of mentors we have. How can we work on it together? Life coaches came onto our doorstep. They heard about the community schools model. The director there had worked in our schools. A perfect partnership. In any other world, BB/BS and Life Coaches would have been competitors. Under the community schools model, we are encouraging them to work together.
Half of our students at elementary stay after school for an hour of targeted services or homework help and one hour of activities. We sat down with curriculum coordinators. How can we make sure we are teaching the kids similar discipline and having the same academic outcomes? Sometimes daytime learning, if that method isn’t working, after school is a great time to try a different method. So we have monthly teams for each of these major projects.
The other key partners we have are the YMCA. Also a 21st Century Grant at the high school.
For Family Resources, our major partner is CAPSH (Community Action Partnership of Suburban Hennepin.) They have a couple dozen different services, basic needs, emergency assistance, tax assistance, employment counselors, food assistance. They asked if they could be a lead partner in the family resource room. They provide two staff two days a week. They donated $20,000 of furniture to get family resource room started in the elementary and high school. Now we are working together to bring in other partners that seem to be a good fit, particularly for our diverse populations: Lao, Hmong, African and Latino organizations. We are opening our doors. If you need office space, come on in. We’ll provide the space if you provide your expertise.
Three key areas: Let partners see that community school isn’t just a program here or there. Not just health center or family resources. It is the whole picture, a philosophy of how we do school. Academics have to be tied to enrichment and wellness and supports.
Change has to come from the top. We have been able to be successful very quickly, because the superintendent and principals are on board.
Keith Lester: We are doing 7th and 8th grade gender-based classes in all the core classes. Another innovation that isn’t new. We are seeing some success, particularly in the 7th grade. In Kindergarten, we have one class of boys, an experimental deal. They did a comparison. You look at the level, the percentage score. The boys didn’t have those other distractions and we taught them the way boys need, a lot of activity. They need the music. People say they want more boys classes. There can and should be more girls classes.
I am pretty much the only district level administrator left. We have cut $8 M since 2001. We have no librarians. Bureaucracy in Brooklyn Center: I am it. A former superintendent would say, “because we are so small you can wake up with a good idea and have it implemented by noon. … Sometimes it is almost that fast.”
Julie Ha Truong: AVID program: Advancement Via Individual Determination, is a course we have, grades 9-12 for a few years. One of the first. Very successful. We had our first graduating cohort of 25. 100 percent graduated and onto post secondary. … The thing I like, they think of each other as a cohort. They challenge and support each other.
Every day they have a class with an AVID teacher to help kids get ready to be college bound. The students we focus on are the ones who might otherwise not have considered college but are doing OK academically. Next year we are expanding it to grades 7-8
Keith: A lot of students in athletics. They have 30-45 minutes of downtime. We have made it mandatory to go to a class and do your homework and be there and make sure you are caught up with your day-to-day classwork….. We have worked in homework help with athletics.
Family resource rooms are amazing. Right away when they opened, we had a room in each building and said it is yours. It is a public building. It belongs to the public. And if you have program and it is beneficial to kids, come on in. We have a clothing closet that is working. One family got help with energy assistance, saw what was going on and came back the next day and put clothing in the clothing closet.
We have this building, Community Corner, an old liquor store. It’s a family resource center, a small space right in the middle of the apartments, up on 69th and Humboldt. We have families coming and going. Guy was out in a heavy snow storm. He had a shovel, He said “I got bread from you yesterday, I want to shovel your sidewalks.” That is community.
Five years ago when I came there was a committee called Healthy Together NW convened by Park Nicollet Foundation taking about needs of children in NE Hennepin County. Someone said “we don’t have any community clinics in this area. We have high need and high poverty.” Mick Johnson, president of the foundation, said no one has ever stepped up. 2.5 years later, there is a 2,400 square foot health resources center with medical, dental and mental health services. Every child in Brooklyn Center has access to free or reduced cost services in all three areas. No insurance, no nothing. They have grants and other resources to make sure the children have the services. A retired board member from the Park Nicollet foundation, a former contractor, got donations, contractors and suppliers donated, $260,000 later .. we opened the facility. You walk down the hall in the high school .. you turn the corner and walk into the health resource center and you are in a clinic. … It is beautiful.
We no longer have the excuse that we can’t teach these kids because they have these barriers.
We are working on a referral system, working with staff not to identify students who might have mental health problems but to recognize behaviors that are different and let someone know.
Julie: Issues around sharing information and referring clients. This is the community schools model, what does it mean? They are now comfortable with the referral format we have. We are trying to simplify referrals for teachers. They don’t need to know all the partners. They need to know the three key people in the school to ask.
Community schools model are all very similar:
- Community Leadership Council: major partners and community representatives that come and stay informed and support the community schools initiative. Ours meets quarterly.
- School leadership Team: Team within the School. Principals, Special Education Director and IB coordinators. We meet every other week.
- Topic Based Action Teams: We have 10 of them. They meet sometimes weekly, sometimes monthly, depending.
Keith: Initial results: Anyone can make the data look how they want to look. Average rate that went onto post secondary had been 45 percent. Last year it was 75 percent. This year it might be 45 percent again. All the initiatives .. the AVID program is outstanding … teen pregnancy prevention with Hennepin County. Some initial data says it is improving … Community/family involvement, we are seeing it …
We had 15 appointments back to back the first day the dentist was there.
Julie: Clothes closet has three families that come in every day, an average of 60 families a month.
Keith: Brooklyn Center is the poster child for defeated referendum. We have had six consecutive. We are $1.9 M in the hole. You can’t believe the passion in the staff. We understand poverty. We understand taxes. We get that part. How do we get that sense of community? Geoffrey Canada had two or three millionaires who funded everything …
We hope to be one of the next Baby’s Space sites. We want to start prenatal. We want to get after infancy, preschool, toddler on a much more coordinated basis. That is our next chunk. Some of it is dream. Some of it is real. We have leased the space. We can’t afford to remodel it yet. It is the right thing to do.
Q&A
Q: [Couldn’t hear many of the questions; not picked up on the tape]A: Keith: Kids are looking more at the technology related things. We live on grants. We have a television studio, a graphic arts studio, a dance studio, and a black box theater. Sustaining it is going to be our big job. The grant runs out. Music tech lab is the most popular class. In the media center, kids turned to the Education Assistant and said, “Wow, this is just like the rich kids school.” They are so appreciative.
Q: Obvious group to work with would be Apple?
A: I am going to the Apple leadership meeting next month.
Q: Leadership Council?
A: Half of the team is simply our largest partners: YMCA, CASH, 21st Century Coordinator, resource room lead partner, business rep, media, student, parents, some ethnic community representative, city mayor, city manager, police chief, and park and recreation director for the city. Probably about a dozen.
Q; Teams?
A: Each team ranges from 4 to 15. Assume the average is around 10. The Health Resource Center Team started at 10. Now every meeting has 30 people.
Q: You took responsibility … it worries me a little bit that the schools are taking responsibility for solving problems that other parts of society have failed on, which has been what we have been doing for 50 years. Have you had a chance to reflect on that, and what you would change in the other systems that affect kids.
A: We are not providing anything other than space, opportunity and access. A part of all of the things we are doing is to teach a level of self sufficiency. That Health Resource Center won’t deal with every problem they have. It will tell them it is important to take care of your teeth, and that you go to the doctor when you are not well.
My response is, if they don’t have it at all and we can make it accessible and teach them to access it themselves, that’s good. This can’t be a constant give away. This has to be a constant gift to each other. Discover why it is important to be part of your community.
Julie: Community schools is a philosophy for how community looks at youth development. In other states, it is not led by the school. It could be led by the county, it could be led by a library, some are led by another YMCA. They are still called community schools.
Q:
A: We sat with our community education person who does early childhood and said, “do we have programs for infants? What are we doing with prenatal?” Yeah, we did. But they were done by different organizations who never talked to each other. There was no continuity. We don’t know if they made it to the next level. We want to make something seamless. We think Baby’s Space will help us with that.
We lose parents because we don’t keep them engaged. We don’t hang onto parents. That is the dream. The medical space is open for infancy through high school.
Q
A: The Health Resource Center opened three weeks ago. What they are seeing discipline referrals, those kind of climate related things. If I had to pick something that we are not doing well on, it’s bring staff in. There are some that need to see the connections yet. We met with the elementary staff this morning to get that conversation going.
Julie: They were trained to do academics. This is new to them.
Keith: It isn’t perfect. We are enthusiastic. Some things we do well, others we have a long way to go.
