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Parents, educators and community leaders, now is the time. Want to improve our schools? Want to help our children?
In the next few weeks Congress is going to consider the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. This is the federal government’s single-largest funding pool for kindergarten through 12th-grade education. The bill represents the best opportunity to address not only poverty, but also to close the achievement gap and improve our schools for kids, educators and the community.
We know that to improve the performance of our lowest-performing students, we need to address poverty. A child with a toothache is not going to care about math. A child who is hungry does not care about history. The best teachers and most gifted school leaders cannot eliminate this pain or alleviate the hunger. Yet the solution exists in communities across this country.
Organizations such as Communities In Schools are deploying site coordinators, who aggressively obtain and harness community resources to effectively blunt the impact of poverty on students. In Pennsylvania we serve more than 40,000 students in 70 school districts.
Communities in Schools goes to the heart of the dropout problem in our community, and together with our community partners we do whatever it takes to help at-risk kids succeed by providing them with wraparound services. The research is there and the proof exists that our model of providing wraparound services or integrated student supports works.
An education law that enables and encourages our principals and superintendents to provide wraparound services will give them the resources and the permission and flexibility to do what they know will work.
I’m privileged to work with some great school leaders who appreciate our work and would like to see us do even more. Washington shouldn’t dictate what these local leaders must do, but an effective education bill should incentivize what they can do to make the biggest difference.
We hope that the president and Congress will listen to the concerns of educators and explicitly enable them to provide wraparound services. We cannot wait any longer.
Ryan Riley
President and state director
Communities in Schools of Pennsylvania
Harrisburg