In many high-need metropolitan areas, schools hold the potential to serve as community anchors, providing both students and their families with services that can meet their essential, health, and educational needs—all under one roof. The Full-Service Community Schools (FSCS) grant program supports these full-service community schools’ planning, implementation, and operation. Today, the program is successfully addressing the lingering impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, such as chronic absenteeism, learning loss, and mental health issues, to name a few, instilling optimism for the future in under-resourced urban, suburban, and rural communities.
Paterson Public Schools (PPS) in Paterson, New Jersey, has been dedicated to a community school approach since it launched its first community schools with a federal FSCS grant in 2010. The growth of the PPS community schools network, now comprising 13 community schools in the city and two additional schools in partner district Passaic Public Schools, is a testament to the success and impact of the program. These schools and their partners provide an in-school health clinic at each location along with a range of supports relevant to each specific community, addressing issues as diverse as food insecurity, hygiene and laundry needs, restorative practices, academic enrichment and afterschool programming, cultural adjustment programming for new immigrants, teen parenting supports, student leadership, adult education, and more.
Building a Partnership to Champion District Community Schools
The partnership between PPS and Metis, a testament to effective collaboration, began in 2021 with Metis serving as an evaluator for a 21st Century Community Learning Centers grant that serves two PPS district schools. The relationship grew when PPS submitted a successful FY 22 FSCS capacity building grant. Working closely with the district’s FSCS department, Metis researchers helped refine data collection tools, enabling community school site coordinators and school clinic staff to more easily and accurately record data needed for federal reporting purposes. Striving to use data for formative improvement efforts, Metis also created a new report format that gives the district quick, accessible monthly updates on the relationship between students’ use of school and clinic services and their attendance—a response to the schools’ concern with chronic absenteeism.
This budding PPS/Metis partnership supported the development of a new PPS FSCS application for FY 23—this time for a successful multi-local educational agency grant that now supports four Paterson schools and two schools from neighboring Passaic Public Schools. While still early in the five years of funding support, Metis remains committed to supporting data-driven decision-making, ensuring that all decisions are strategic and well-informed. For example, Metis will build a dynamic, new data dashboard that will provide community school site coordinators instant access to student-level and aggregate data, allowing them to immediately recognize and intervene when a student is at risk for chronic absenteeism, behavioral issues, or other key indicators.
Supporting a Participatory Evaluation Process
Metis is also proud to take a collaborative, participatory approach by involving key Paterson and Passaic stakeholders in the evaluation process. During monthly advisory meetings comprised of principals, school and district staff, and community partners, Metis researchers engage the advisory group in providing feedback on surveys, data findings, and related items to ensure all instruments are culturally relevant and valid. This involvement of key stakeholders is crucial in ensuring the success and effectiveness of the evaluation process.
Additionally, Metis will leverage a participatory Results-Based Accountability (RBA)-inspired process in its work with the advisory group. RBA is a “disciplined way of thinking and acting to improve entrenched and complex social problems.” Part of the process will include using specific data trends as a starting point for “turning the curve”—a step-by-step process that starts with a critical measure you want to change (such as chronic absenteeism rate) and ends with a specific action plan to help the data move in the right direction.
Metis is also excited to launch new youth evaluation advisory groups at participating high schools. These groups will allow students to voice their successes, challenges, and suggestions while learning about the fields of research and evaluation.