In an article published by Chalkbeat NY, Patrick Wall gets to the heart of the power of data. This school year, new  data tools created with Google Drive  are helping schools “transform the contents of several clunky education department databases into an intricate picture of student behavior” – and Grand St. Settlement is helping lead the charge.

The recent addition of three Community Schools  – Foundations Academy in Bed-Stuy, P.S. 158 Warwick, and Juan Morel Campos Secondary School – to Grand St. Settlement’s NYC partner schools created a big wave of excitement among staff and community members alike. The Community School model translates the founding principals of our settlement house to the realm of public education. Like settlement houses, Community Schools are hubs of activity where families gather and work together to share resources, address common challenges and build the communities they want and need. Key to success is personalizing connections and services – which these new tools are helping schools do.

Our own Katie Hahn, Community School Director at Juan Morel Campos Secondary School, is helping connect these tools to afterschool programming to help understand students’ attendance patterns, personal challenges, and track graduation requirements. She is quick to praise the Community Schools Initiative, saying that although schools are traditionally isolated as learning sites for children, “schools have incredible potential to be hubs of community resources.” She continues:

This vision is closely aligned with the settlement house model, which focuses on strengthening communities through collaborative, multi-generational programs that are embedded in the neighborhoods they serve. At Juan Morel Campos Secondary School, Grand St. Settlement provides an array of services, including counseling, tutoring, attendance mentoring, home visits, and assistance with benefits enrollment. We also build partnerships with other community-based agencies and service providers in order to bring even more resources into the school building. These services and partnerships focus on supporting not only the student, but the whole family.  Campos and Grand St. Settlement understand that students perform best when families have their needs met.

 

Thanks to a personalized, data-driven system, teachers and directors like Katie can dig into records of individual students or zoom out to find age-related or school-wide patterns. Check out the article over on Chalkbeat to read more!