August 2009

Letter from the Editor

Welcome back! It’s good to be writing to you again after the hiatus of the warm summer months. Kids are heading back to class, some to new teachers, some to new buildings, and some, under new systems and policies. This issue describes two new approaches to promoting school success and increasing high school graduation rates.

The Feature Article describes the implementation of the Johns Hopkins Early Warning System in five Colorado school districts. The Early Warning System research shows the clear link between course failure as early as sixth grade and eventual high school dropout. Any school district that can reduce the rate of course failure will likely increase their graduation rate down the line. Fairfax Public Schools in Virginia has also taken a new strategy. The Strategy of the Month describes how FPS has de-linked attendance from grading, and instituted alternative attendance related incentives and sanctions. We hope other school districts with follow these leads!

We at NCSE are implementing some new plans, too. We will be overhauling our website, so you can expect some changes! We will highlight a change or addition monthly in our What’s New corner, as we add new publications and revamp how our growing publication list is organized. What’s New in September will include the registration to our next session of How to Evaluate Your Truancy Reduction Program, to be held October 26-27 in Denver.

Jodi Heilbrunn,

Newsletter Editor

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Truancy and Dropping Out of School:
Same Students, Same Solution
by
Dr. Ken Seeley, President
The Partnership for Families & Children

We know that attendance and truancy predict school dropouts. This has been reinforced in NCSE’s recent collaboration with the Center for Social Organization of Schools at Johns Hopkins University. Our colleagues at Hopkins push for the development of an early warning system based on ABC: Attendance, Behavior problems (suspensions); and Course failure. The intersection of these three problems as early as 6^th grade can predict 60%-90% of high school dropouts. We do not need to wait for high school to prevent dropping out. We can see them coming if we put an early warning system in place.

These ABCs from Hopkins combined with our NCSE solution-focused AAAs – Attendance, Attachment and Achievement – make for a powerful intervention for schools to adopt. We have created a statewide prototype, Colorado Graduates, to deliver on the Governor’s promise to cut the dropout rate in half. We targeted five large school districts where researchers from Hopkins did a retrospective analysis of dropouts to demonstrate the power of early warnings and the opportunities at all levels from 6^th to 12^th grade to improve graduation rates. The National Center for School Engagement, working with two other non profit organizations (Colorado Youth for a Change and the Colorado Children’s Campaign), is designing and implementing dropout prevention and recovery programs in each of these districts. The targeted outcomes are to put the ABC early warning system in place in 6^th to 12^th grades; adopt prevention strategies based on attendance, attachment and achievement; and implement a dropout recovery and outreach program that has a 4 to 1 return on investment.

Over the next six months we will be adding information and resources about the connections between truancy and dropping out on our website, www.schoolengagement.org. Here is a preview of some of the coming reports:

· The Children We Left Behind Are Dropping Out of School: Making the Case for Using Title I Funds for Dropout Prevention and Recovery, (K. Seeley). September 2009.

· Investigating Peer Victimization in Schools: Bullying, Truancy and School Engagement. (K Seeley, M. Tombari, L. Bennett and J. Dunkle). September 2009.

· Dropouts in Five Colorado School Districts Early Warning Signals and Possibilities for Prevention and Recovery, (M. MacIver) October 2009.

· Toolkit for Implementing Colorado Graduates: Understanding the Dropout Problem and Mobilizing to Meet the Graduation Challenge, (M. Mac Iver and R. Balfanz). October 2009.

· Girls Fade Away; Boys are Asked to Leave: A Report on Gender and the Dropout Problem, (L. Bennett, and M MacIver). November, 2009.

· Rural Dropouts: Special Issues, Different Opportunities, (M. Tombari). December 2009.

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Ditching the “F” for Ditching
by
Jodi Heilbrunn

Fairfax Public Schools in Virginia has decided to drop its all-too-tough attendance policy that gave an automatic “F” to students who had as few as three unexcused absences. A recent article in the Washington Post entitled 3-Strikes Attendance Policy Gets Expelled, describes the changes. Teresa Zutter, Director of Intervention and Prevention Services explained that “about two years ago, the school system organized a team of teachers and school officials to examine the county's attendance practices. That committee found that different teachers, schools and administrators had different ways of handling attendance issues, but nearly all felt they were being limited by the three-strikes rule.”

The problem with such a policy is that while some students are motivated never to skip, those who do make a mistake and skip three classes have no reason whatsoever to attend the rest of the semester. They will fail no matter what they do, so why bother? Students quickly become disengaged from school under such circumstances, and problems can escalate. If they cannot graduate on time, they may drop out altogether.

Fairfax Public Schools changed its attendance policy indirect acknowledgement of the link between school engagement and attendance. The new policy states that attendance may no longer directly affect grades; however, class participation and in-class activities will still be graded, and those activities cannot be made up following an unexcused absence. Now, sanctions for skipping will include detention during lunch, on Saturday or after school; loss of parking privileges for older students; loss of extracurricular privileges, and parent conferences regarding the student’s attendance. In addition, truancy can no longer be punished by suspension. The result? No matter what the student did yesterday, there is still an incentive to attend today, and learning is not withheld as a punishment for a poor attendance decision. Well done, Fairfax Public Schools!

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Added this month: Fundsnet Services lists grants in 28 categories. The Education and Literacy Grants category currently has 217 grants listed.

Check out the Education World Grant Center! There are lots of grant opportunities listed here, currently including twelve with no application deadlines

The School Funding Center has a free newsletter that includes a limited number of grant announcements and grant writing tips. It also advertises a huge database of grants to which you may subscribe for various periods of time for different rates ranging from $99 for two months to $397 for a year. Grants are available for schools and non-profits.

Teachers, go to Donors Choose to make requests for classroom supplies.

RGK Foundation - The Foundation's programmatic areas of interest include Health, Education, Human Services, and Community Affairs. The Foundation's primary interests within education include formal K-12 education, literacy, and higher education

The Dollar General offers annual or bi-annual grants in five literacy areas:
· Adult Literacy Grants
· Back-To-School Grants
· Beyond Words: The Dollar General School Library Relief
Program
· Family Literacy Grants
· Youth Literacy Initiatives

SchoolGrants.org lists endless grant opportunities for K-12 schools, and has a page on grant writing tips. They also post examples of successful grant applications, both large and small, that readers have shared with them – and you! Use them to make your grant proposal stronger. They also offer a subscription to Schoolgrants Biweekly Newsletter for $45 a year.

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Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. School Connectedness: Strategies for Increasing Protective Factors Among Youth. Atlanta, GA: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; 2009. This publication provides concrete steps to implementing six evidence-based strategies to increase students’ sense of connectedness to school by building adult support, making sure students belong to a positive peer group, fostering a commitment to education and improving school environment.

Terzian, Mary, Ph.D., et.al. On-line Resources for Identifying Evidence-Based, Out-of-School time Programs: A User’s Guide. Child Trends Research to Results Brief, Publication #2009-36. July 2009

Child Trends produced this Guide to assist funders, administrators, and practitioners in identifying and navigating online resources to find evidence-based programs that may be appropriate for their target populations and communities. The Guide offers an overview of 21 of these resources—11 searchable online databases, 2 online interactive summaries, and 8 online documents—that offer information on a range of evidence-based, intervention programs. These programs include, but are not limited to, out-of-schooltime programs. Issues to consider while reviewing these online resources and ways to determine where particular programs lie on a continuum of evidence are discussed.

Terzian, Mary, Ph.D., M.S.W., Lindsay Giesen, B.A., and Kassim Mbwana, M.P.P. Why Teens Are Not Involved in Out-of-School Time Programs: The Youth Perspective.
Research to Results Brief, Publication #2009-38. July 2009.
Fifteen adolescents (aged 13 to 18) from Washington, D.C., participated in a roundtable discussion in November 2008 to find out why low-income minority teens tend not to participate in out-of-school time activities, how to recruit more teens, and how to make programs more accessible to teens.

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American School Counselor Association
2010 Annual Conference, “Celebrate School Counseling”
July 3-6, 2010
Boston, MA
On-line registration opens January 2, 2010

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www.schoolengagement.org

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