by Brad GuntonThe 74
This story appeared first 74A non-profit news site covering education. Sign up for the free newsletter from The 74 Get more like this in your inbox.
When a student is in crisis, the hardest problems are easier to solve when someone already knows their story and trust is already there.
The heart of New York City Every child and family is known Initiatives are school caring adults who check in with students in residence Temporary residenceBuild relationships with families and help them connect to help through difficult times.
Every public school in NYC and the Department of Homeless Services have access to shelters Portal by New VisionA planning, case-management and interagency operations platform. It is designed to allow school teams, shelters and partner organizations to do the day-to-day work of moving individual students towards promotion, graduation and post-secondary outcomes.
The success of this initiative reinforced for me how relationships need the infrastructure behind them to translate into system-wide change. That is now at risk as the city is considering cutting funding for the portal.
The portal combines student data from NYC public schools with family shelter data from DHS, helping school staff better understand how to support students living in temporary housing situations. The ECFIK initiative builds additional features and functionality into the portal to support the day-to-day work of caring adults — social workers, teachers and other school staff who volunteer to serve as a student’s primary point of contact in temporary housing. It allows these adults to document check-ins, coordinate referrals and access key information in one centralized place.
Households experiencing housing instability often already carry enormous burdens. The last thing they need is to repeat painful situations to different people because systems are disconnected. Acting as a single point of contact with a caring adult solves part of the problem, freeing families from navigating a rich but labyrinthine system of resources available among nonprofits and organizations across NYC.
Technology solves the other part of the problem. Better coordination helps preserve a family’s dignity. This allows school and support staff to visit families with more care and consistency, giving families the sense that people are truly working together on their behalf and coming to every interaction prepared to meet their needs. School staff cannot effectively support students and families — and thereby maintain trust and strong relationships — if important information is fragmented across systems, buried in email attachments or dependent on staff chasing phone numbers and updates from multiple locations.
Importantly, the initiative’s integration with the portal ensures that student needs and support plans do not live in separate systems isolated from the rest of the educational experience. A student needing clean laundry should rise to the same level of importance as a failed state test, and the initiative brings that visibility.
Within the portal, caring adults and school staff view attendance patterns, academic performance and other school data as well as student support information, all following strict data privacy protocols and permission rules that respect student privacy and restrict information to their supporting adults. Having planning and outcomes data together allows schools to respond in real time instead of reacting too late, and to pivot if an intervention isn’t working.
Using a common platform designed with and for all caring adults allows central program leaders to identify patterns, such as how family needs change over the last 10 days of the month or how families differ across neighborhoods and boroughs. Instead of information contained in static spreadsheets scattered across individual computers, data becomes a real-time tool to support deeper system-level understanding and action.
A Independent evaluation The first year of the initiative showed that participating students experienced stronger academic performance and less mid-term transfer than similar students who were not in the program. In elementary school that translated to an 8.8 percentage point gain in math. In surveys and focus groups, caring adults reported stronger relationships with families and a shift in school culture toward more empathy and support for students experiencing homelessness.
Beyond data, the initiative has seen caring adults respond to needs both large and small, creating life-changing impacts for their students’ families. A caring adult helped a family experiencing domestic violence support safe transitions for hours in a moment of crisis. Another helped a mother cut her two sons’ hair so they could go back to school with confidence. Many others had the only reason a student showed up at school that day: because someone cared about them, expected them, was ready to listen if they needed something. Because they felt familiar.
Portal didn’t get those boys’ haircuts. The phone didn’t answer in the middle of the night. It couldn’t sit with a mother and figure out what comes next.
What the portal did was ensure that when someone was ready to do these things, they weren’t starting from scratch.
That’s the part I care about. Not the software itself, but what it made possible: that caring adults were able to devote their attention to a family instead of a spreadsheet.
That’s what this initiative represents to me: technology that works behind the scenes, so relationships are front and center to capture and transform the trajectory of a family’s outcomes, one check-in at a time.
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This is the story is produced by 74A nonprofit, independent news organization focused on education in America.
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Photo credit: splash
