 It is so great to be back in a place that I remember spending a few of my days a few years ago. It's good to see everyone here this afternoon. My name is Christian Dorsey. I am Chair of the Arlington County Board, neighboring municipality to Washington, D.C. But mostly, I'm here today in the capacity as a friend and former colleague of our guest of honor, Elaine Weiss, who is here to premiere her book co-authored with Paul Ravel, Boulder, Broder, Better. I will say that as part of this, Elaine generously asked me to participate since my municipality does have one of the largest school districts in Virginia, so I guess there's a nexus. But really what I'm here to support is the work that I saw Elaine as a colleague do for many years as National Director of the Broder Boulder Campaign where she coalesced this wonderful idea that had its genesis here at EPI, that there's much more to student success and achievement beyond the accountability standards that were invoked at the time and the very narrow way in which people viewed teacher quality and student success, but instead embracing this whole idea that there is a lot more to the effort, including wraparound services and the other advantages or disadvantages that families may have in their children's success. So this work coalesced in many important national initiatives. I would say biased though I may be, it helped change the national conversation very quickly from a very misguided path to the right path where we look holistically at how to better support children and Elaine's work, this book brings all of that into one coherent volume. So we're thrilled to have this event today to introduce the book to you and to have a conversation hopefully with a public school teacher if the weather cooperates. So with that I will now turn it over to our guest of honor, Elaine Weiss. All right, I was going to just thank you all in a kind of perfunctor way for coming, but given what you have gone through to get here, I sincerely thank every one of you for braving actual death and destruction to be here today to celebrate the release of Broder Boulder Better and importantly to help Paul and me spread the word about how education policy and practice needs to change to meet the realities of today's public schools. And I'm going to now do what I should have done, which is move this microwave because I am shorter than it was. Okay, so I wanted to start the discussion today by giving a little bit of history or context for how this book came about. When I first took the helm of BBA, the Broder Boulder approach to education, which is now over eight years ago, the education policy landscape as Christian just referenced was radically, radically different. BBA was launched in the summer of 2008 by Larry Michele. Hey, Larry, thank you, and Richard Rothstein here at EPI in response to increasing emphasis on using higher standards and student standardized tests as key strategies to fix what were alleged to be our broken public schools. Longstanding evidence that poverty and segregation are in fact the core drivers of achievement gaps was being sidelined. And as many of you will probably remember, poverty was dismissed by many prominent education leaders as an excuse for poor teaching and low standards. And teachers and principals who suggested otherwise were often publicly demonized and called part of the problem. To give you a sense of it, when I came on board as national coordinator in 2011, Michelle Rhee was wielding a broomstick on the cover of Time Magazine. Yep, good times. Michael Bloomberg was proclaiming that Joe Klein, his chancellor's reliance on student standardized test scores, had cut New York City public school achievement gaps in half. And Arnie Duncan was drawing on similar strategies he had employed when he was heading Chicago's public schools to shape federal U.S. education policy. The number of education journalists who expressed any skepticism at these assertions were few and far between, although we certainly love them. And public opinion also seemed to favor this market-oriented approach. So other groups that focused on a more supports-oriented strategy were similarly struggling to gain traction and to persuade wary foundations that what they were doing was worthy of investment. Even among people who did, who were persuaded that poverty mattered and who did acknowledge the need to address both in and out of school factors, there was a tremendous amount of skepticism that this could viably be done. Now, there were certainly examples at the time of individual schools that were taking a broader, bolder approach, but we felt strongly that the most effective and the most sustainable efforts happened at the community level, where district leadership plays a very key role, and policy can be used to boost the efforts in individual schools. So we looked for examples of communities where this was happening and where this was working. Over the next couple of years, we identified and studied a dozen such places. They all engaged in cradle-to-career supports for children with an emphasis on boosting both opportunity and enrichment for the most disadvantaged, or, to put it differently, as we do in the book, they are all using integrated student supports to deliver whole-child education to every child. There are many inspiring examples in these chapters that you're going to see. In some cases, I had the privilege and the joy of witnessing them firsthand. In many cases, I relied on a combination of websites, news articles, research reports, and a lot of interviews. And I want to share just a few of those today, but I'm going to keep it short first because, of course, I want you all to buy and read the book, but also because teachers' voices have been very much absent for too long in these discussions, and today, if she is able to survive the tornado, we will have the chance to chat with a truly phenomenal teacher who's working in a district that, while it's not featured in the book, certainly could have been. Now, one of our criteria in selecting the districts to study was that they had to incorporate investments in young children, and that support had to involve not only the children, but their parents. As we describe in the second chapter of the book, these are about as diverse a set of communities, and we define communities very loosely, as you could imagine. They range from a very small rural district serving less than 2,000 students in a corner of Arkansas near Wal-Mart headquarters, all the way up to a cluster of schools in New York City, which is the biggest school district in the country. Others include a string of eastern Appalachian Kentucky counties that draw on the nation's first rural promise neighborhood grant, a distressed urban zone in North Minneapolis, and a mid-sized Rust Belt City. Some of these serve heavily African-American student bodies, while others are virtually all-white, and still others are heavily Hispanic, or increasingly so, like the rest of our country. They also range from one of the nation's most politically progressive communities, Montgomery County, Maryland, right up the road, to one that a local superintendent described as, quote, the buckle of the Bible Belt. So it should come as no surprise that they have tackled early childhood education like other aspects of education policy in very different ways. Some of these districts, like Kalamazoo, Michigan, Montgomery County, and Easter on North Carolina, can rely on strong public pre-K programs. In these cases, their strategies focus mainly on expanding or enhancing programs to enrich the day, or expanding programs to serve more children. In other cases, however, districts had very few state resources to draw on, and they had to be pretty creative. Tantula Park, for example, a poor, virtually all-black neighborhood in Orlando faces a state program that's one of the lowest quality in the whole country. So sending its disadvantaged children to Florida state pre-K would have done very little to prepare them for school. And Harris Rosen, the hotel magnet who's been sponsoring Tantula Park for well over a decade, understood that if his pledge of college scholarships for every student who graduated from schools there was to be a meaningful reality that they could actually take advantage of, because those kids really needed to have a strong early start. Luckily, he also understood that building up the neighborhood's assets, its own assets could enhance the value of his own investment. So he had the wisdom to consult a good friend who was an early childhood expert and take her guidance to the then two neighborhood women who were operating child cares out of their homes. He helped them get licensed and certified. He supported coaches to enhance instruction and curriculum in those places. And he supported nurses because he wanted to make sure that those kids were physically healthy, mentally healthy, and on track meeting their developmental milestones. Today, Tantula Park operates nine to ten such centers, depending on the number of kids that it needs to serve that year. None of them serves more than six kids, so every child is getting phenomenal one-on-one attention. And no parent needs to walk more than a couple of blocks to drop their kids off or pick them up, and they know their providers from the time they're two until the time that they enter kindergarten. The most creative strategy I saw, however, was definitely in Appalachian, Kentucky, led by Partners for Education. The counties that partners serve include some of the poorest and most isolated in the entire country. Only about one in five adults in this region has a bachelor's degree, and the child poverty rate often goes above 40%, with children living in deep poverty. Families living on $10,000 a year less is not uncommon. This isn't also an area that has been hit very hard in recent years by the opioid epidemic. In one of the smaller elementary schools that I visited, the principal told me that at that point over half of her students lived with neither of their biological parents. So many mothers and fathers were in jail in rehab programs or had died of overdoses that uncles, aunts, grandparents, and even great-grandparents were raising a lot of these children. In one family, there were four siblings in that school who had a younger sister, not even in the school, all being raised by their grandmother, who was doing it by herself. So as you can imagine, between the crazy long distances, some of these kids would have had to travel to get to Pre-K. A lot of parents who simply didn't understand why Pre-K mattered, and households that were so chaotic and so dysfunctional that enrollment itself was a challenge, a lot of those kids were not getting ready for kindergarten, and these were the kids who most desperately needed it. So partners got very creative. They took a small grant and they retrofitted two school buses into mini-traveling preschools. Now stepping inside one of those school buses is a pretty magical experience. We're talking hardwood floors, a little library, little board books, colored blocks, everything that you would want to see, flashcards, little baby animals, everything that you would want to see in a great preschool classroom, but very neatly organized into bin so they can be transported all the time. Each bus is staffed with two early childhood specialists who travel across the county, and although there aren't a lot of kids there, it is a pretty big space, so they're traveling very long distances, making weekly visits to households with young children. For the first half hour of that visit, a parent, almost all of whom are young single mothers, and a three- or four-year-old child, play, read, and sing with a specialist, and learn to model and practice the kinds of activities they can do on their own all week at home so that those kids are getting their pre-literacy, numeracy, and executive function skills. In the second half hour, those lucky kids get one-on-one with the specialist while mom gets to sit with the other specialist and talk about child development milestones and great parent techniques and job preparation so that when she leaves that bus she's a more confident, thoughtful parent and she's better equipped to stabilize her household. I was also lucky to visit just before Christmas, so the bus that I was in had an extra cute little feature. They had put a little photo booth in there so the kids could put on little antlers or wrap themselves up with bows, and the specialists would take pictures of the kids and make them into little Christmas ornaments which they gave to the parents as presents. Across the country, there are some other amazing things going on in Vancouver, Washington, which is just above the border between Washington and just across the river from Portland, Oregon. In that district, a big focus has been on both addressing the trauma that a lot of the kids are experiencing and bringing with them to school and preventive strategies so that every child is emotionally and mentally healthy and cushioned from the effects of these traumas. Kids who visit a counselor in one of the elementary schools not only have a beautiful space to walk into that is literally decked out from floor to ceiling with bee decorations in cheery black and yellow because the counselor happens to just love bees. Sorry, Maya. But their closets are stocked with everything from granola bars, pens, notebooks, shoes, underwear, even jeans. So kids who walk into that counselor's office needing to have a talk about struggles at home, when those struggles at home involve we didn't have money for snacks, my parents couldn't afford school supplies or my clothes aren't clean, not only can get what they need without any stigma, they can even try on a pair of pants if they need to. So not only does this reduce stress, but it also reduces anxiety and anxiety in a dramatic way. One of the most phenomenal things I saw was walking into a second grade classroom. All the kids were sitting on a circle, on the floor with their teacher doing what they call a mindful minute. So they were learning to breathe deeply and they were practicing meditation and the teacher was explaining that this would help them transition. When they were done, they continued quietly, they passed a gourd around the circle and how this would help them when they went on the playground to, you know, make better choices of not fighting with their friends and they would also be better at focusing in class. And I really have to tell you, you probably don't have to think too hard to imagine that watching a group of seven-year-olds engage in confident discussion about how much better equipped their PFCs prefrontal cortexes are is definitely one of the more interesting things you'll ever get to do. It's pretty phenomenal. As you can see, the work that these communities and many others are doing is not only evidence-based, but it is producing yet more evidence for us that integrating supports for students in service of whole child education is incredibly effective. They also demonstrate, however, the sharp contrast with the majority of schools and districts that are not implying these approaches, where income and race and, yes Michelle, re-zip code continue to dictate millions of children's odds of success. Unfortunately also, while these are growing in number, they are still minimal relative to the need that we have for them. As we note in the chapter on community schools, two of the largest organizations working in this space have both committed to massive expansions in the next few years, which is wonderful, and there are multiple other hopeful indications that the field is beginning to cohes into a truly unified movement. We conclude the book by calling on all key stakeholders, national and local leaders of integrated student supports initiatives, policymakers, philanthropists, educators, and school and district leaders to make it their priority to move this approach from the margins where it has languished for far too long into the mainstream. We emphasize the critical importance of putting those who are at the center of how education happens. Teachers, parents, and students themselves at the center of our efforts to improve schools. For far too long, the voices of those in the classroom and closest to it have been ignored and even dismissed. That has to end, as does the lack of respect for teaching as a profession. Incorporating community voice also means embracing low-income parents and parents of color as true partners in their children's education, and not problems to be overcome, as has too often been the case in public schools across this country. The communities that are featured in our book have done all of these things, which is one of the major reasons that they are proving to be so effective and making so much progress. We very much hope that our book, together with new resources that are coming out like last year's community school playbook, and growing unity and momentum in the field will boost similar efforts and enable them to greatly scale up. What I was hoping to say is that speaking of teachers, we will now get a chance to have a conversation that is still forwarding the Potomac, and so Christian and I are going to sit down and have a little conversation, and when Joy is able to join us, she will. So thank you. You want to check? All right. While you're checking, I want you to just chew on this. Aside from Montgomery County, which I assume has a great connection because that's where you live and where your children go to school, how did you go about selecting the other communities that you studied as a part of this? From our national partners who work in the integrated student supports field, some of them came from news articles that we read where we got alerted. Some of them were self-nominations, but we had several key criteria that they had to pass in order to qualify to be studied. One was that they had to be using wraparound supports. They were looking at the whole panoply of kids' needs and meeting those needs. They were starting from when kids were very young all the way through. They had to be engaging teachers from the beginning in these efforts and engaging parents and the community from the beginning in these efforts. The other thing that they needed to do was showing that what they were doing mattered and that they were making a difference. By making a difference, we meant, as you alluded to, not just raising test scores, although we certainly care, but much more importantly narrowing gaps in very important ways. How are they doing in socio-economic status? Were they narrowing gaps based on race? Were they narrowing gaps based on other metrics of disadvantage? And not only were they doing that with test scores, but we were very interested in how are they doing when kids... First of all, when kids are coming into kindergarten. So are they making progress there? And then at the tail end, how are they doing in the transitions to high school? What is that looking like? And very important to us, how are they doing at the finish line? Otherwise, and are they graduating them in a meaningful way? Are those kids taking AP classes? Is the gap in taking AP classes and passing AP classes narrowing? So those are the things that we started to look at. It was different in every community, but so those are some of the metrics that we looked at. And I suspect you mentioned that listening to teachers is really important. So I'm sure among the communities that you looked at, the involvement of teachers in offering solutions to the classroom, can you just talk a little bit more about that and what made those communities and perhaps just as importantly superintendents and other decision makers responsive to what the teachers were saying? It was huge. So a lot of what we were looking for and what we got a lot of affirmation when we did the interviews was hearing what did... I want to take a step back and say when we talk about the importance of listening to teachers, it's fundamental. Teachers are who teach and this is about education. So part of this is just like duh. When we wanted to fix our health care system if we thought that doctors and nurses were the main problem, that probably would have been fairly bizarre. Well, think about how bizarre it is in this case. The fact that we haven't listened to teachers is a big part of how we got ourselves in the mess that we were in to begin with. And so in these communities it was in many cases teachers and a lot of cases local unions who stepped up and said, you know, the big problem is that we need the kind of resources to meet needs that are walking in with our kids into our classrooms every day. We need principals to pay attention to this. We need superintendents to pay attention to this needs to be a priority. A great example of a teacher who I talked to who gave, I think her quote is in the case study from Joplin gave a really impassioned like when my kids asked me for like a one sentence answer and they end up with like five paragraphs and they're super happy. In this case, I was super happy. I asked the teacher what kind of impact it had had to have bright futures which is one of these initiatives that works to meet all of kids needs in a holistic manner. What was the difference before and after? And we'll get to hear from Joy who by the way is closing in on us soon because she's in a bright futures district. It was literally night and day that until bright futures came teachers felt isolated and burdened and unable to even express the kind of struggles they felt they were dealing with because it was totally on their shoulders to deal with the kids who were hungry, the kids who were traumatized, the kids who were coming to school in the same flip-flops every day in January, the kids who their classmates didn't want to sit next to them because they stank because they didn't have a washing machine or they didn't have running water at home or they didn't have parents at home to run the washing machine that didn't run and she said you know we get bright futures and all of a sudden not only are these resources pouring in and we have a mechanism handy where I just make a phone call and someone says I'm going to take care of this kid no worries I'm going to send this kid to a counselor I'm going to get this kid sneakers but the whole community all of a sudden understands what we're dealing with and that lifted this weight off of our shoulders and it was beautiful. It has been very inspiring. So I'm curious the mix of schools that you looked at range from the very affluent to you know ones that are very much resource deprived and how do you heavy heavy on the resource deprived? You over sampled there indeed but you know given that you found some very useful things in Montgomery County to spotlight and talk about what's your hope in terms of how this book is is received in the broader community what should districts that don't have those existential issues of children in mass showing up so wholly unprepared to learn but still nonetheless have gaps in achievement, attainment however you want to quantify it what can they take from this and what should they look for in this? That is not surprisingly a fabulous question exactly the kind of question I expected from you and that is in fact one of the reasons to look at places like Montgomery County and frankly like Vancouver Washington Joy hi come on up and she made it she's our hero perfect great timing I'm just going to answer this question and we're going to let you catch your breath and turn it over to you one of the reasons we felt it was so important to include communities like Montgomery County like Vancouver and frankly like many others that have a mixture is because this is as we are increasingly recognizing not an isolated problem this is a problem in virtually every community and in Montgomery County as I know in Arlington part of what we are all grappling with internally is facing the reality of the huge shift that we are all experiencing we have this massive growth in the number of students in the past 20 years and almost that entire shift that entire growth is kids who are low income kids of color kids who are immigrants kids who need special education support and kids who don't speak English well that changes the face and the culture and everything in the community and in the district radically and it's very hard and it creates all kinds of conflicts that we thought oh we're so progressive and nice we'll deal with this yeah guess what like not always and so we really need to be having these conversations in these communities because almost no community except for ones that have managed to carve themselves into ridiculous little donuts to keep out the kids they don't want are now facing this and so when we talk about the diversity of communities one of the things we thought was so important was to range all the way from the most rural the most isolated the most devastated up to places where we think why do we need this help because we need this everywhere terrific well Joey we are going to invite you to join this conversation and Elaine has mentioned just briefly that Frederick County public schools is a bright futures affiliate but before we even get into that if you wouldn't mind just giving us a snapshot of what Frederick County public schools looks like the demographics the teaching the learning environment and really what your experience has been in terms of highs and lows since you've been teaching there I've been in Frederick County public schools for 24 years I started there in 1995 and to give you a little of my background I'm originally from Pittsburgh Pennsylvania and I did my student teaching in Philadelphia Pennsylvania so when I moved into rural Frederick County Virginia was a shift it was a culture shift in and of itself Frederick County is predominantly a rural school division they would like to think they're a little suburban they're a rural school division we have about 13,500 students a little over 2,000 employees during my time there I've worked predominantly in middle school it has become as Elaine was just saying a much more diverse place than it was 24 years ago when I began teaching and so we are seeing the needs of our students shifting we want to have more opportunities for our advanced students but we also are finding that we need to have more services and initiatives for our students in need and how do you find that balance when you are in a rural community when you have people who think well those aren't my children we hear that a lot when we're at Board of Supervisors in school board meetings people who say when my kids went through school I'm done so why am I responsible for this generation as they're getting people in the community to understand that every generation is responsible for the next generation none of these children are your children or my children they are all our children and that's what I think not just small communities but as a nation that we need to be embracing that concept that we all need to be doing everything we can to give everyone the equal opportunity everything that they need it's not just academics anymore when I began teaching 24 years ago academics really was the focus that was what I was asked to do teach the children and we took of course all the children that's one of the sayings of public education we take every child that crosses our threshold we don't have the opportunity to say now I've heard about Johnny we don't get that opportunity Johnny comes across my threshold and my job is to teach and embrace Johnny and we have to remember that when those students come in whether they're tired whether they're hungry whether they've been up all night listening to violence at home they are bringing the best them that they have every day because they are bringing the examples that they have at home they are bringing the opportunities that they've been afforded from home with them and it is their best and sometimes it can be really hard because we bring our own biases I mean it's kind of obvious I'm white middle class I live with white privilege my whole life and I know that and I have to recognize that those children don't have parents who tuck them in every night every one of them they don't have parents who let them sleep with 50 books in their bed when they were in elementary school some of them don't have 50 books in their homes and so the shift has become recognizing more of those needs and trying to figure out at first it was the teachers alone you know as individuals we're scrambling okay we know so and so doesn't have water how can we get them into school early and maybe get them down to the gym and you know as teachers you're making these little baskets and you're letting this kid come to class 20 minutes late and the other kids are wondering why but it's because as teachers you know they don't have water right now and you gotta do something because you don't want them to stand out but as the problem began to grow especially through the recession we began to recognize this was more than just a few teachers on a team or a few teachers in a school it was a real problem it's a community issue and we need to step up is the reality we need to figure out in bright futures we were so fortunate when we got Dr. Sovine in Frederick County because he was willing as a superintendent to rock the boat quite frankly in our community he was willing to say you know what we need more and we need something different and how can I make that happen for you as educators how can I make that happen not just for you the teacher but we're doing this for our students and how can we bring the best of everything to every child and so we began the partnership with Bright Futures because we recognized we had a growing need during the pre-recession we could say to our students I want you to bring two highlighters, two glue sticks I could give them a whole supply list and then it became you can't require the supply list anymore these are recommended items and if they don't bring them and what we found is more and more of our students were unable to bring the basics of school supplies and that was eye-opening because I'm a parent of three beautiful bonus daughters buying new crayons every year that was a no-no in our house like you're going to reuse those crayons sorry kids you're not going to get we're going to reuse, reduce, reuse, recycle until we can't I mean that was how I was raised that's how I raised my kids weren't reducing, reusing, they didn't have and Bright Futures was there to step into our community and to begin helping us to meet those basic needs how do we handle a child who's going to bed hungry every night how do we handle the child who's coming without breakfast our school decision did not initially offer breakfast it's now almost equal to our lunch program we have that many students who rely on us for food we do backpacks through Bright Futures so that they can have dinner at night and food on the weekends and food over the holidays schools are no longer just institutions of learning we are the primary hub of care outside of the family and for some of our students we are their only safe place because if you're suffering violence at home if you're suffering upheaval if your parents are constantly moving because they can't hold a steady job for whatever that reason is your one safe place is your teacher's classroom and there are stories that we hear from them that make us know that you know what that state test that I have to give I really don't care I just don't care I care more about who are you going to be when you grow up from the other lessons you have learned from me than what you do on a state test I care more about the content of your character than a single test score because there's no place on that state test for me to say as a teacher Johnny didn't get an hour of sleep last night Susie didn't have a meal a hot meal for the past three days Johnny's grandma just passed away from cancer I don't get to put any of that anywhere on a state test but those are the struggles that we deal with every day and we know that because as adults their struggles are no different the difference is we have the psychology and the life experience to help us deal with them and these are little people they're down to kindergarteners and pre-k they don't have the life set and so as teachers have begun to take on more opportunities like Bright Futures have helped us to begin tackling some of those basics the reality is their needs are far greater we need the mental health workers we need the school psychologist we need access to medical care for our students in need we have some of our schools who now offer laundry service so the kids can bring their laundry and they can do laundry in our schools so that they have clean clothes so they're not that kid but there's so much more that they need and we need to find ways and in reading Elaine's book there are so many different programs out there and we need to find ways to get these programs the reality is no matter how rich a school division is it can be a Montgomery it can be a Loudoun there are still these children there and we need to make sure that even when you're the lone child in a school in need that you're not in need I think when Elaine said that we should listen to teachers you now know why so thank you Troy that was an excellent so you took us through a journey where there was at once awareness and individuals going ahead and trying to solve the problem figuring out their place in making the world better which is typically the way we see change starting but we're now sort of on the arc and evolution where your district embrace the concept of equity each child is who each child is they matter and we meet them where they are and that's resulted in the systems change approach let's figure out how we fundamentally change how we do our service delivery that's you articulated that in 10 minutes but just tell us about how difficult that is sort of in the broad scheme of things to achieve because as we think about the world around us the need to go from personal responsibility to care about the problem to focusing on equity to systems change we're not there yet so how do we bring that to scale on a large level I think the first hurdle that any change has is individual resistance all of us are afraid of change change is a scary concept for us as individuals and as teachers I'll just call it like it is part of our job that we love is our autonomy I close the door and I teach but the reality is we had to begin opening up our doors and we had to begin sharing our stories and we had to begin sharing our student stories and that wasn't something a lot of us were used to doing we were used to just taking care of business and doing what needed to be done and then to know that we had these needs and we had to have the system shift of the top wants us to do this they're going to bring in the bright futures and it's not just needing the physical needs of children we also have mentors who come into our schools and work with children and that was kind of different like you want but I don't know that person they've been better I don't know that person and it's scary it's intimidating to teachers because quite frankly we do want to be all to the kids and we have to recognize that I need help I can't help these 25 kids when these three kids are so needy and so I need to be able to say you know what I can't do it all I'm going to let others come in and help me do my job so that all of my children will flourish and that's intimidating for a teacher especially for elementary school teachers because I've been there too they're really possessive of their students but that's a good thing but you also have to get the community and how do you get the community to understand that there's a need how do you get the community to understand that we we're now changing we're not just saying parents come in and volunteer which is the general mode of parent teacher organizations and associations parents come on in we want you to be parents and room moms and dads and things and now we're saying to the community we want you to come in and be part of our schools that's a big shift regardless of the community to understand that it is a community school concept because that's foreign to us schools are little isolated islands and so you have to get the division moving the same way you have to get schools moving the same way you have to get the community moving the same way it takes a big movement it takes a big shift and we're still in the process of shifting from my perspective as an educator in Frederick County but we're getting more on board and we're hearing bright futures more and more people are bringing it up in public meetings when you go to different events you'll hear somebody mention it so it's becoming known and their power is becoming known as people are recognizing the little things they can do with a Facebook page it's amazing we had a story we had a young man whose family's refrigerator died and mom and dad were struggling to just live day to day and he happened to say something to his guidance counselor at high school he said I don't know what we're going to do because I don't know how I'm going to have food we have money for food but no place to keep the food and she's like what's the problem I don't have a refrigerator anymore she made the phone call it got posted on the Facebook page and I think it was less than 24 hours what's needed and yet when people know sometimes it's so easy to say oh my gosh I can take care of that and I don't know whether it was a local business that met that need or whether it was just an individual that went out and bought them a refrigerator but I can assure you it wouldn't have mattered if it was scratch and dent or an apartment size refrigerator whatever they got it met their needs and that's really what people need to begin understanding it doesn't take one of us it takes every single one of us for the ship to occur Lane do you want to comment at all? so not surprisingly I think leadership is a huge piece of this to say the degree to which I am daily all the time impressed and amazed by Dave Savine's leadership is just is unreal and it does take that kind of leader who's willing to rock the boat and do these things I mean it is much more true by the way for those communities that did this 10 or 20 years ago even that are doing it now because it was a much harder conversation than it is now but that segues to the second piece I think and that is conversations a criterion that I did not mention was that every one of these conversations in many cases led by the district leader but sometimes not sometimes led as Paul points out by a mayor and I should say Paul's initiative and that's very important because not the kind of you know, oh mayors as education chiefs we're going to run schools kind of thing mayors because they have the capacity to host these conversations and bring together every key player who touches kids and when they can do that it's extremely powerful so that's the strategy that his lab is focused on but this does begin with conversations and one thing that every one of these communities had was a leader who was willing to have that tough conversation and that tough conversation was how poverty is affecting our community how poverty is hitting all of us and how poverty is hitting the children who are all of our children and it does take that conversation and that conversation needs to happen in communities but it frankly needs to happen at the state level, governors need to be using their bully pulpits to have that conversation and it definitely needs to be happening at the federal level I'm totally not holding my breath on this administration and the last one frankly did a pretty crappy job on that too but one can always hope that in the future, in the meantime as we talk about in the book a lot of what's going on right now is at the local and state level and there's tremendous momentum compared to what there was even five years ago for those conversations and I think we can consider the ones that have already happened as ice breakers this happened, nobody died communities didn't implode, they talked about poverty they started facing it instead of ignoring it understanding it wasn't there and guess what, they're doing better and part of our hope in the book is to say you too can do this and it will actually make things better for you too because whether or not you talk about it it's there I concur that local government is exceptional so we are now going to share the conversation with the rest of you please raise your hand if you have a question and please stand if you are able so that everyone can hear your question this gentleman right here a microphone's coming to you I'm curious if you found it's working I'm curious if you found in the successful programs communities that reform their school discipline policies limiting the role of school resource officers anything that would change school push out and other issues related to that so that and I'm sure Joy can speak to this as well but I would say that that goes in two directions and is incredibly relevant and we actually do discuss in the book in two ways for one the communities that are stepping forward to have these tough conversations and that look at the whole child and understand the need for supports innately have a leg up when it comes to understanding that discriminatory harsh awful discipline policies are exactly that and so they are the communities that to start with are most likely to be already taking a look at that but one of the many beautiful things that comes out of this is that and this should not really come as a surprise that when you help kids who are coming to school traumatized cushion and deal with that trauma when you're helping kids who are coming to school hungry not be hungry when you're helping kids who are coming to school dirty not be dirty there's a lot less fighting and acting out and so there's just less need for that kind of discipline as well and again it illustrates again what is common sense you know it's part of what was both inspiring and infuriating about running BBA was I felt like if I went to a normal human being on the street and said hey do you think it would be hard to teach a bunch of kindergartners who haven't had breakfast a normal person would have said no it would be impossible whereas education leaders are like no it's fine just stand up and yell more they'll be good they'll listen to you so part of this is really a lot of what I think is in the book is the common sense that we all know when kids are less stressed they're nicer when kids are less angry they punch each other less and when kids are happier they behave themselves and you don't need to put them in a corner I would say she definitely hit that right there when we were meeting their needs then we do have less discipline problems now we've had a shift in the state of Virginia we do positive behavior interventions now so we basically have matrices where we set up the expectations for students and for the adults in the building so they know not only what I expect them to be doing in the classroom in the hall in the bathroom they know what my role is as an adult in the building whether I'm a teacher, an aide, a custodian in the hall in the classroom in the cafeteria and so we're trying to focus on when we're seeing the good now there are still negative consequences I mean if you decide to break bad we're gonna have to deal with you but what we really noticed is teachers are really shining a light on the good they want to please they really want to do well kids want to experience success some of them who want attention and for some of them that's why they are bad they just want that recognition they want to hear their name but when they figure out I can hear my name twice as often when I'm good it's amazing the shift that occurs not a touch on school resource officers we talk about the school to prison pipeline and whether or not we should have school resource officers in our schools and I will say that I think that is very community dependent a lot of our inner city schools have large issues with having school resource officers and I see it and it does become a matter of a lot of policing in the schools as opposed to disciplining in the schools being in a rural community we do have school resource officers in all of our secondary schools but the one thing I can say that we have is there are very clearly defined roles as to when and why a school resource officer can be involved in any incident in our buildings and I have had teachers come to me as a union representative angry saying this happened and the police officer didn't do anything the school resource I'm like exactly that's not the school resource officer job that's your administrators oh so and I think that's what's really important is that distinction of when we're dealing with an issue that is discipline versus the law and how that is dealt with varies greatly from school division to school division yeah do you have a memorandum of understanding with the police department that limits their role there's I don't know if they have anything formally written I believe they do because our police officers actually go through training as to what is and is not their role in our schools and I'll connect with you in Arlington County we do have an MOU that outlines the terms by which SROs are deployed and engaged in schools and under the work what circumstances they get involved not just to limit the SROs but quite frankly also to empower teachers to recognize that most of 99 percent of discipline should fall within the realm of school personnel it is really that one percent or less hopefully that should engage the SROs and we have a concrete MOU that's gone through a couple of different iterations to make sure all parties are clear and also that the community is clear yes sir and for this discussion to be held we agree well now meaning this year and next year because of the Curran Commission I'd like a different approach now I'm next door to you in Prince George's County and the majority of this not just the 44 percent of the foreign born but the majority of the students in Prince George's schools are trampolines and psychologists call it toxic stress but anyway kids got problems broken homes and broken heads and broken hearts and you got enough to do to teach what can the Curran now we worked all the remarks on Annapolis we got 266 million to set up a program that's coming out next year what can you do either politically or in the classroom what can we as a community do to get into the classroom to help not just the discipline but the education academics and all that's necessary to keep these kids in Prince George's we've been fighting for bilingual psychologists bilingual counselors what can we do as a community to help and I would and also hope you would broaden that beyond just the schools as well because I also heard you say what can you do in terms of encouraging policy change or investments to be made decision makers so you could broaden that to say what are the key initiatives that should be undertaken that keeps the community as a part of this effort I want to kind of send this in two directions I think when we're looking at opportunities like we have right now in Maryland to kind of rethink several things first of all rethinking how we fund schools but rethinking the incentives in terms of there are incentives that can be built into laws to incentivize school community partnerships and that's something that every state should be building in one of the things we talk about in the book in the community schools chapter is there are wonderful models out there there are model laws out there there obviously are also federal laws and federal grants that can enable schools to do that and almost every district that we studied relies on some of that federal money to help build those school community partnerships but in terms of a really powerful model for getting the community engaged I actually think Bright Futures has really one of the most powerful models I've ever seen I mean in short there is a council that's district wide that involves key community stakeholders and members but maybe just as important every school has a site council that involves key community members community leaders I'll give actually there's a great example in Joplin and there's a quote I think in the book there was a church that was up the hill from one of the schools in Joplin and for years and years and years the church always referred to the school as that school down the hill because it was that school down the hill well Bright Futures came in and a few years later that church became involved and one of the leaders in the church sat on the school site council and they were talking a few years later and the pastor who's very involved noticed that they had all begun to refer to it as our school down the hill that is the kind of what seems like a very small shift is enormous in how communities can become involved and it doesn't have to be churches but certainly in a lot of community churches are fantastic institutions to be doing to be engaged in that work and I think part of that too is breaking down barriers there's so much of a mindset that oh separation of church and state we can't have the church coming into our school yes we can for all people it's okay to have the church coming into the school and those partnerships that Bright Futures has afforded us we have several of our faith leaders in Frederick County who are now very active with our school division now they're not coming into our school and trying to get our children to join their church but they've recognized that we have children in need and that when there's something posted on Bright Futures and it says thanks to this church for helping us out it gives them a little recognition in the community it lets people know that you know what that's some place that cares about kids and that's really critical I think one of the things we need to be aware of is we all need to be more informed about both our local and state politics it's amazing how many people are uninformed and I think we need to work to encourage you're here because you care you want to know more but we need to be willing to have those conversations with our neighbors with our colleagues about local and state politics in Virginia we know we need to be doing more to get the funding back we're not even in Frederick County we're still not funded at pre-recession levels we still have less funding now than we did in 2008 we've also built I want to say it's three or four new schools and we still have fewer teachers than we did before the recession having built new schools so we need to be aware of these things within our own school communities we need to be asking the questions because every school division unique needs need to be met and you see that when you start reading the book and you see all the different types of community school programs there are so you need to be going to your local school division and asking the question oh you need to talk to your school board I kind of can't hype that enough school boards really have played two different kinds of roles in these communities in some communities they've become incredibly supportive and helpful and in other communities they've become incredibly difficult and oppositional and one of the things that we can do as someone just pointed out to me the other day that nobody knows who's running for school board and that's nobody votes your vote probably counts 20 times if you vote for school board so please figure out who's running for school board go talk to them go tell them that this needs to be a priority because they set policy that this needs to be a decision factor in who gets hired as superintendent and in every aspect of policy that is one place where your voice will be heard email ask questions because that's how you're going to learn what's going on ask what they're doing for children in poverty ask how they're helping your ESL immigrant students integrate into the school division ask what they are doing hold them accountable because if we're not holding them accountable they're just not going to do it and if you're not hearing from the school board reach out to the superintendent because like Elaine said we have been so fortunate Frederick County Dr. Sovine came in and change we were all terrified here comes a new superintendent what's going to change now and we have been so fortunate that the change has been in the best interest of students in learning it's never about Dr. Sovine as I'm sure you have figured out it is always about the students in the division and about the staff and then move to a more informal Q&A with the reception since we started a little bit late yes so two interrelated questions one how does the higher educational system plays into this because we mentioned tests higher education degrees right it's a craze nobody really goes to school to learn they go to get degrees look at all the evaluations students give and rate my professor it's all about how easy they are half you can get nobody talks about I learned something you know they're just easy you can get a grade so how do we de-link learning and credentials and be the role of informal settings I think one of the greatest things I see in DC is the library system is totally stepping up to the plate they become very innovative but there's still a long way to go to take these other institutions like libraries like museums and turn them into places for participatory learning so I want to start with actually the tail end of your question because one of the other powerful things that a lot of these communities are doing is helping turn those many community institutions into other places of learning the other myth that has long dominated the education conversation is that learning happens in school now as many of us well first of all some of us would say very little learning happens in school but even for those of us like me who loved school I know I'm a totally in a minority here most of my learning still didn't happen in school of course we spend very few hours there compared to the rest of our lives and we need to be creating opportunities in all kinds of places and so some of the really beautiful things happening in these communities in Kalamazoo is that the library totally stepped up but the symphony has stepped up to create fantastic learning opportunities that very clearly are not related to just credentialing because I doubt those kids are getting a trumpet degree there are in Easterum they have 40-50 partners every museum every fantastic after school organization is now involved in what's going on in Easterum so there really are wonderful opportunities and one of the things that these community school partnerships does is unleash the potential of the entire community and actually before turning it over to Joy I want to speak on that note for a second one of the things that I really neglected to say that I think is most powerful about these communities is that they are not taking a deficit approach to their children or the communities one of the biggest problems in public education and it goes hand in hand with the fact that poor parents and frankly parents of color have been considered as problems to be overcome sometimes explicitly so unbelievably insultingly so those communities have also been seen as basically holds or deficits to be filled and that is not the case these are communities that like every community has phenomenal assets to bring to the table these are kids who have the kind of grit that wow can their classmates learn a lot from it boy have they had to cultivate it and one of the things that these communities also does very beautifully is not only the community but treat these children and their families as assets to be drawn on and that is I hope one of the lessons that comes from this book it's like what Joy is saying there's amazing bests in every single child who walks into a classroom we have failed for so long to not see the greatness in every kid one of the things these communities are doing is seeing that and I really hope that that powerful message is something that that we scale up students have so much to learn the key to us is how do we connect them with the opportunities before they even get in the classroom how do we catch them up with the opportunities to go to a museum to have heard a symphony to have heard an instrument I've seen students come to what we call our sixth grade honk sessions which is where they get to try out the instruments and decide if they want to be in band and some of them have never touched a musical instrument these are 11 and 12 year old children so that's what the communities are overcoming is how do we give them those pre-school learning opportunities those opportunities without a teacher by their side but the key is how do we reach their parents because you can tell an elementary school student hey the museum's free this weekend but if mom and dad are working three jobs and they don't have a car and grandpa and grandma don't even live in state so those are the things that we need to problem solve as communities how do we bring the museum to the kids they might not be able to get to the museum or how do we get it to them and by figuring out how we can enrich their lives as youngsters we know we'll be enriching who they become as adults sorry I know we didn't even touch on your post-secondary question there's so much I mean as much as the book actually is pretty dense there's a lot in there it's so much more that Paul and I could have said I want to really briefly and we can talk about this more after there are a lot of great connections between these schools and post-secondary institutions in myriad ways they're doing very creative things to better connect kids as I started to say when I talked about the metrics and how we felt we should measure progress and I want to very very carefully not say success these are not success stories these are stories of great progress this is not a mission accomplished thing they are finding ways to draw in institutions of higher education and connect with them that are wonderful that I think are rarely done partly because they are looking at the whole community and it's everything from drawing on local colleges to find mentors drawing on non-local colleges to find Skype mentors in rural Appalachia all the way up to bringing colleges into their high schools giving kids dual credit again looking at barriers huge barriers that kids face if anything much bigger when it comes to post-secondary education because there you've got financial barriers and then two of our communities are actually so called promise communities where the integrated supports are grounded in the pledge of a scholarship for every kid so they have a totally different and really robust relationship with colleges but that's one of many things that we would need more time to talk about so read the book oh yes so not only do we really really want you to buy the book share the book but and this is if and only if you really love the book please blurb the book on Amazon because our marketers tell us that that is the best way to get more people to buy the book so thank you thank you