February 2008

Letter from the Editor

We’ve been together now for several months, and I think it’s time you learned a few things about me. First of all, I knit. Staff meetings are soooo much better when you’re knitting… Second, I’m a cheapskate. So when I wandered into a nearby art supply store at lunchtime and saw the Stitch ‘n Bitch 2008 page-a-day calendar on sale for half price (this being February already), I had to have it. Third, I’m impatient. So I snuggled into bed one night and went through every last page. It’s got knitting patterns, nifty historical facts about knitting and the wool industry, and cameos about Stitch ‘n Bitch clubs across the country. And you know what I found when I got to the Wednesday, March 19 page? Yup, you guessed it. A school engagement strategy! The Strategy of the Month was written by Ali Newman of the Bushwick, Brooklyn, New York Harbor School Knitting Club for the calendar. I reproduced it below because research shows that kids who are involved in extracurricular activities at school have better attendance, academic performance, and high school completion. Now, if you don’t like to knit or don’t quite feel competent to start a knitting club, don’t let it needle you – your students will enjoy learning any hobby you enjoy. What matters is that they get to do something fun with each other, and with you, and at school – a place they’ll look forward to being just a bit more if it includes a fun club activity. No knitting? How about juggling? Swing dancing? A baseball fan club – you can incorporate statistics! A pyrotechnics club! Well, no – maybe not pyrotechnics… Back to knitting… In addition to the Strategy of the Month, Ms. Newman has written a wonderful feature article just for us about another effort they are making – one to get their low-income kids into college. It dovetails nicely with last month’s college focused middle school mentoring project. Thanks All!

Jodi Heilbrunn, Editor

Invitation for Letters to the Editor

Do you have feedback regarding our feature article or strategy of the month? Would you like to submit a feature article on a topic of your choice? Send your commentary or ideas to info@schoolengagement.com for possible publication in our next issue. Please make the subject of your message “Newsletter commentary.” I would love to hear from you!

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By
Allison Newman
College Advisor
New York Harbor School
Bushwick, Brooklyn, NY

Bushwick, Brookyn: a war zone that’s under attack by both drug dealers and real estate developers. Condos going up across the street from housing projects. Hipsters with trust funds moving in next door to illegal immigrants who work the night shift at the local factory. This neighborhood is in the throes of the early chapters of gentrification and the school-aged children are caught in the middle. The kids populating the local schools represent the Old Bushwick. The raw Bushwick. They are the kids of Dominican, Caribbean, Mexican, Central American, Puerto Rican and Asian immigrants. Many are immigrants themselves. Despite the rising cost of rent in Bushwick, despite the money coming into the neighborhood, it still has a dropout rate of approximately 70%.

At New York Harbor School, currently located in Bushwick where I am the college advisor, we seek to provide students with a challenging and compelling high school experience that engages them through the study of the maritime culture, history, and environment of New York City (click here to visit the school's website). Sounds good, right? Sexy? It is…but it doesn’t always work. Despite high-tech boat-building courses and hands-on marine science field classes, we are still working with students who historically have among the highest dropout rates, teen pregnancy rates, gang membership, and poverty rates in the country.

Enter College Summit and the Harbor School’s commitment to providing its students, all its students, with the opportunity to go to college. College Summit is an organization that dedicates itself to closing the achievement gap and working with schools to provide low-income students with the skills necessary to maneuver through the college application process. We joined forces with College Summit two years ago, in time to help our first class of graduating seniors apply to college. Our first class of students challenged us consistently for four years. Over the course of their high school span we lost many of them to truancy, the criminal justice system, the work force, gangs, and pregnancy. However, we did manage to graduate 67% of the original class – over twice the neighborhood average - and of those, about three quarters went on to some sort of higher education.

There are countless factors that contributed to this important victory: the Harbor school’s engaging curriculum, an amazingly dedicated staff, and, I like to believe, the fact that from the first day of their senior year we told the students that all of them were expected to apply to college. College pendants were hung in every inch of empty wall space. Teachers had “Wear Your Alma Mater T-shirt To Work Day.” A core group of seniors was trained by College Summit to be Peer Leaders in the college application process (the power of peer influence at its finest). We created a College Acceptance Bulletin Board where we hung every college acceptance letter any student received (including community colleges and technical colleges). We took college trips. We talked about college incessantly. And it kinda worked. A buzz was created. It became cool to want to go to college. Students talked to each other about where they applied, where they were hoping to go, where they had been accepted. Seniors began to flood my office every morning with their latest piece of college mail, asking me to help interpret the letters. A new language was being spoken in Bushwick.

The next step was to take this buzz, this energy that the seniors felt and figure out how to let it wash over the rest of the school. How can we get the juniors to feel this electricity? Imagine if the sophomores and freshman actually got it? Imagine a school in Bushwick where all students comprehend, from day one, the value of a high GPA, the significance of their SAT scores, the value of extra curricular activities?

Okay, so I’m getting a bit ahead of myself. One year later and we are certainly not quite there yet. But, the process had begun. Our current senior class started the year high off the energy of last year’s senior class. They have wholly absorbed College Summit and seemed to breeze their way through the college application process. Newly trained Peer Leaders worked with their peers to start early on their personal statements. Parents of seniors are actually showing up for parent meetings to talk about college and financial aid. We had students submitting college applications this year who never, ever thought that they had the right to apply to college. We are even hoping for a graduation rate somewhere in the mid-80%

Bushwick, Brooklyn: Julio, a foster child who has been arrested several times and has struggled to stay in school, sits in my office beaming like a little kid who has just been handed a huge rainbow lollipop. “That’s it, miss? I’m done? My application in straight?” he asks me.

“That’s it, Julio. Your application has been submitted and you are officially a college applicant.”

“That’s hot, miss. Seriously.”

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Got Yarn?

I’m a guidance counselor at the New York Harbor School, in an impoverished section of Brooklyn. Our Stitch ‘n Bitch started when few students wandered into my office while I was knitting, asked me what I was doing, and said they wanted to learn how. I got donations of fifteen beginner knitting kits, and the Harbor School Knitting Club (aka Stitch n’ Bitch) was officially formed. The spots were filled before I could finish stapling the sign-up sheet to the bulletin board. I couldn’t believe my eyes: Ten of the fifteen kids who signed up were boys. After our first meeting, I spotted my proud new knitters in the cafeteria finishing their lunch in a hurry so they could get back to their knitting! Soon enough, word spread, and SnB Bushwick now has thirty new knitters (in a school of only 125). Everyone’s knitting: boys, girls, popular kids, not-so-popular kids, jocks and bookworms.

Newman, Ali. 2007. “Bushwick, Brooklyn, New York Harbor School Knitting Club.” In Stitch ‘n Bitch Page-A-Day Calendar 2008. Entry for March 19, 2008.

Workman Publishing Company: New York.

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Teachers, go to www.DonorsChoose.org to make requests for classroom supplies!

Find and apply online for competitive grant opportunities from all Federal grant-making agencies

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 (February 5 application submission deadline)

Here’s a wonderful webpage that lists endless grant opportunities for K-12 schools, and has a page on grant writing tips! They also offer a subscription to Schoolgrants Biweekly Newsletter for $45 a year.

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The Center for Comprehensive School Reform and Improvement maintains a School Reform and Improvement Database. Search on “School Engagement” in the keyword field, limit your search to 2000 through 2007, and you will find 65 articles, many of which are available online.

College Summit provides districts with a strategy and tools to transform college enrollment throughout the district. Equipping students, teachers, counselors, principals and administrators alike, College Summit builds your capacity to send more of your students to post-secondary education.

The National College Access Program Directory is a free online resource for students, parents, counselors, and researchers and those operating college access programs. Over 1400 programs are included in their database, with at least one program from every state and U.S. territory. The database is searchable by state, zip code, program name, services offered, target population and more.

The Pathways to College Network is a national alliance of organizations committed to using research-based knowledge to improve postsecondary education access and success for the nation’s underserved students, including underrepresented minorities, low-income students, those who are the first in their families to go to college, and students with disabilities. The website includes a research section with many publications in addition to the Martinez and Klopott article linked below.

Bailey, Thomas and Melinda Mechur Karp. (November 2003.) “Promoting College Access and Success: A Review of Credit-Based Transition Programs.” Community College Research Center, Teachers College, Columbia University.

This article reviews credit-based transition programs including dual enrollment or dual credit, Advanced Placement (AP), International Baccalaureate (IB), Tech Prep, and Middle College High Schools. While such programs have existed for many years, they have been used primarily to accelerate the progress of high-achieving college bound youth who are already prepared for college level work. But more recently, private foundations, educators, and state and federal policymakers have sought to use them to facilitate college access and success for middle performing or even lower-performing students.


Martinez, Monica and Shayna Klopott. (Recent, but no date.) How Is School Reform Tied to Increasing College Access and Success for Low-Income and Minority Youth? Pathways to College Network, Boston, MA.

The mission of the Pathways to College Network (PCN) is to focus on improving college preparation, access, and success for underserved populations, including low-income, underrepresented minority, and first-generation students. To ascertain where we currently stand with respect to achieving this mission, this updated paper—originally developed in 2002— identifies and analyzes school reforms that present evidence of college preparation for all students.

Foley, Eileen M., Klinge, Allan & Reisner, Elizabeth R.(October 2007)

Policy Studies Associates, Inc

Prepared for: New Visions for Public Schools

New York, NY

Evaluation of New Century High Schools

Profile of an Initiative to Create and Sustain Small, Successful High Schools

This report is an evaluation of the New York City secondary schools project of which the New York Harbor School (see feature article above) is one.

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Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence at the Institute of Behavioral Sciences, University of Colorado at Boulder

Blueprints Conference 2008

Denver, Colorado

March 17-19, 2008

International Mentoring Association’s 21st Annual Conference
April 23-25, 2008
Las Vegas, Nevada

How to Evaluate Your Truancy Reduction Program
National Center for School Engagement
Save the date and check our website for registration information, coming soon.
April 28-29, 2008
Denver, Colorado

National Forum for the Coalition for Community Schools
April 30 - May 2, 2008
Portland, Oregon
The International Center for Leadership in Education

16th Annual Model Schools Conference
Orlando, Florida
June 22 – 25, 2008
Showcases, among other topics, student engagement strategies used by high performing schools

College Summit Institute 2008
Baltimore, Maryland
July 9-12, 2008
Formerly called the Educators' Institute, the College Summit Institute is a professional development experience that unites passionate counselors, teachers, and administrators from across the country who are dedicated to the belief that all young people must plan for education beyond high school.

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NCSE is an initiative of the
Colorado Foundation for
Families and Children

www.schoolengagement.org




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