Unless children attend school, learning is impossible but chronic absenteeism is an issue confronting school leaders, principals and teachers everyday in schools all across America. This Spotlight showcases how educators have confronted this problem, with innovative and cost effective solutions, building family engagement, and learning about their…

This Practice to Policy brief, based on insights from UnidosUS's Affiliate Network of community-based organizations and public charter schools in Illinois, Florida, Texas, Arizona, and California, highlights the critical role of Out-of-School Time (OST) programs in supporting the Latino community, particularly in the aftermath of the COVID-19…

Even after significant education turnaround efforts supported by federal and state agencies, achievement gaps between white students and students of color and students not living in poverty and students living in poverty persist (McFarland et al., 2018). Student academic outcomes are often driven by factors unrelated to teaching in classrooms…

In this paper we study the impact on student absenteeism of a large school-based community crime monitoring program that employed local community members to monitor and report crime on designated city blocks during students' travel to and from school. We find that the program resulted in a 0.78 percentage point reduction in the school-level…

Nationally, school-based mental health (SBMH) is seen as an avenue to increase access to children's mental health services and promote mental health awareness. The current article describes the implementation of a statewide SBMH program focusing on partnerships between community-based providers and local school systems, with providers embedded…

This study explored outcomes related to students' participation in a Houston Symphony (HS) partnership at a targeted HISD elementary school. Students received weekly in-school core enrichment instruction and after-school violin instruction by Houston Symphony Community-Embedded Musicians throughout the 2018-2019 academic year. The study found that…

Sport-based mentoring programs have been used across many contexts to engage young people in education. In this research, we explored the influence that an Aboriginal controlled organisation's youth mentoring program has on three remote Aboriginal communities in Northern Territory, Australia. We used a composite set of culturally sensitive methods…

The large and growing number of New York City (NYC) students who lack stable housing has recently received much attention from advocates, researchers, educators, and policymakers. This new brief highlights not only that the City's rates of student homelessness have increased, but also that the problem is most prevalent during the elementary…

This is the third and final of a series of evaluation reports the Data, Research, and Accountability (DRA) Department has conducted on the Communities In Schools (CIS) Graduation Coach program within the Wake County Public School System (WCPSS). In 2015-16, Graduation Coaches served approximately 600 students across eight WCPSS elementary, middle,…

The Community Science Workshops (CSWs)--with funding from the S.D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation--created a network among the CSW sites in California. The goals of the CSW Network project have been to improve programs, build capacity throughout the Network, and establish new sites. Inverness Research has been…

Behaviors that warrant school discipline (e.g., fighting, victimizing peers) is detrimental to school climate and the learning process. This study examines the effectiveness of preventing school disciplinary incidents in middle school through an experiential, social and emotional learning (SEL) program. A community youth development organization,…

It is estimated that as many as 20 percent of school-aged children in the United States have diagnosable mental health conditions, and schools are the primary location where children receive mental health services. Because of limited resources, school-community partnerships are recommended in the literature as a best practice for providing…

Science expositions at the Canning River Eco Education Centre (CREEC), Perth, Western Australia, have been conducted over the last five years (2009-2013) during National Science Week. These expos aimed to enhance science understanding in the community, foster partnerships for science and promote science careers by providing a scientific feast for…

For the past year, the San Francisco Department of Children, Youth, and their Families (DCYF), San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD), and the John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities at Stanford University (Gardner Center) have collaborated to examine SFUSD student participation in DCYF-funded programs. This analysis utilizes…

An inner city school solved its attendance problem by developing special attendance teams that helped promote plans of positive action to prevent children from becoming chronic absentees and potential dropouts. (Author/RK)