SMI and the Workforce Education Institute at Bristol Community College

Great news! SMI has begun working with the newly launched Workforce Education Institute (WEI) at Bristol Community College in Fall River, MA. SMI is providing strategic planning facilitation, coaching, and ongoing guided support to BCC leadership and staff aligning division efforts within the new Institute. SMI most recently provided a leadership training on “Aligning Mission and Behavior for High Quality Customer Service”, which set a course for collaboration across WEI.

WEI, at Bristol Community College, is the one-stop contact for BCC’s comprehensive training, consulting, and pre-employment services for individuals, organizations and companies. Learn more at http://www.bristolcc.edu/community_education/center/

The MassGrad Coalition Challenge: Collaborating as a Community to Decrease Dropout Rates

 

The MassGrad Coalition Challenge - teams representing four communities (Worcester, New Bedford, Franklin County and Malden) - participated in a day-long training event hosted by the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education and facilitated by School & Main Institute. A special group within the larger MassGrad district network, these four communities are focused on decreasing the dropout rate and increasing graduation rates using the power of school-community collaboration, rather than asking schools to address the dropout challenge alone. We believe the strongest responses to education, health, employment, and other community issues take hold when stakeholders collaborate. Easy to understand but actually pretty hard to do!

At this training event, Coalition Challenge teams analyzed the functions of collaborative infrastructure and how they can organize themselves to get their work done - again, no small task when working across organizations rather than managing within a single organization. Teams reviewed the development of their coalition to date and used SMI’s Infrastructure for Powerful Partnerships tool to guide their thinking:

• Where are we strong?
• Who do need to engage?
• Who will outreach?
• Challenges and potential responses?

For more information about SMI's Powerful Partnerships training support, click here.

Rhode Island Foundation hosts Parent Academy Info Session with School & Main Institute

On March 26^th, The Rhode Island Foundation brought together a unique gathering of educators, community-based practitioners and policy makers from across Rhode Island to learn about an effective and proven community-wide and school-based strategy that supports meaningful parent and family engagement: Parent Academies.

SMI uses a uniquely collaborative approach to developing a Parent Academy, where the community as a whole serves as the "Academy campus" and organizations work together as a collaborative network to deliver a wide (and strategic!) range of educational resources, coursework and other oppoortunities to build the skills, knowledge and know-how of parents and families to become full partners in their child’s education.

Andy Beck from SMI spoke to what the collective research tells us about the impact of this work: “Family involvement and student success are linked.  When parents are engaged in meaningful ways that provide opportunities for their own development and the development of their families and their children, student success goes up.  Parent Academies is a new tool that is showing promising results in engaging parents, developing effective communication and collaboration between school and home. Results that students begin to demonstrate through increased attendance, decreased behavioral issues and higher achievement.”  

Representatives from Westerly Public Schools and Springfield Public Schools shared their experiences and the path to building an Academy in their community.  While the two districts are vastly different – small and rural vs. large and urban – the positive impact on parents, families and students has been the same.  Academies can be developed at both the local level and district level.  Whether regionally focused or citywide, size doesn’t matter.  It’s the partnership and collective ownership of school and community stakeholders that make an Academy work. And this works for our children, our parents and our community! 

Springfield Parent Academy - College? YES! Weekend a success!

College? YES! is a city-wide effort to inspire and build the capacity for Springfield youth and families to aspire to attend and graduate from  college. And that by doing so, college becomes a realistic and attainable goal for all students and adults. Last fall in a unique and very successful collaboration we brought together young people, parents and families, schools, colleges, businesses, faith based organizations and our community based organizations to do so. Take a look and see where we went….

School & Main institute has worked as the planning facilitator with the schools and community to develop the College? Yes! model. As you can see by the smiling faces in this video, there is great promise in the work ahead!

Executive Director, Andy Beck, presents at the NAWDP Annual Meeting

School & Main Institute’s Executive Director, Andy Beck, spoke recently at the National Association of Workforce Professional Development Youth Symposium, November 12-14, 2012.  Andy had the opportunity to present to participants School & Main’s dynamic approach to “Making Collaboration Work”.  This presentation specifically covered keys to collaborative success including exploring mutual self-interest, taking collective action and organizing as partners to get the work done. Andy posed two very important questions: 

• If collaboration is such a good idea and there is general agreement about the need to do so – why is it so hard?
• How can we make the case for needing more (programs, pilots, etc.) when we haven’t connected what we already have?

A second presentation on Collaborative Case Management was made. Here, Andy went into greater detail describing SMI’s technique with at-risk youth support and community services.

“Frontline youth service professionals bring their most challenging youth cases to a regular, structured case conferencing forum where they strategize wraparound supports with colleagues from across the community or region. In the process, youth receive more holistic support, tailored to their needs, and program staff develop a much deeper knowledge of how to navigate and manage the vast array of services and opportunities available for their most at-risk clients.   On a parallel track, SMI works with organizations to develop a more seamless and collaborative system – one intake form, one permission form, one treatment plan, collaborative data access and other critical system features. “