Communities in Schools brings help, boosts graduation rates

“Marginal improvement” usually connotes something relatively small and unimportant.

But when it comes to high school graduation rates, improving at the margins can have hugely positive consequences.

After years of steady gains, the U.S. graduation rate has reached a record 82 percent, mirroring the rate in Fort Worth.

That’s good news, but it still leaves almost 1 in 5 Americans without a high school diploma — the bare minimum credential for a middle-class life.

According to a recent study from the Alliance for Excellent Education, raising the graduation rate to 90 percent in Fort Worth and surrounding areas would mean 2,400 new jobs, $200 million in salaries and $400 million in home sales.

That’s a major impact.

An extra 8 percent might seem like an easy enough goal, but today’s dropouts tend to be the “tough cases.”

These are the kids trapped in multigenerational poverty. Poverty increases dropout rates because low-income kids lack the resources needed to thrive in school or to bounce back when things go wrong.

Take Sarah, a 13-year-old Tarrant County student who was recently referred to Communities In Schools because of truancy and declining grades.

A CIS social worker discovered that Sarah was living in a van with her mother, six siblings and a family member with a disability.

Sarah’s father, the sole financial supporter, had been sent to prison, and her mother kept the children from school because she was unable to wash their clothing or keep them fed.

CIS immediately reached out to local service agencies, including the Salvation Army, to provide for the family’s housing, food, clothing and other basic needs.

Sarah was able to return to school, having slept safely in her own bed.

More than a million times each year, a kid just like Sarah drops out of school and into an uncertain future.

But Sarah is likely to beat the odds, because she’s among the 1.5 million students served by Communities In Schools.

All across the country and here in Tarrant County, CIS matches at-risk students with the community resources they need to stay in school.

Our model is known as integrated student supports, and it’s recognized in the new federal education law as one of the evidence-based solutions for our dropout crisis.

Nationally, CIS achieves a graduation rate of 91 percent. Our local students do even better, with a graduation rate of 95 percent and a post-secondary enrollment rate of more than 80 percent.

Through partnerships with 10 Tarrant County school districts, CIS places licensed social workers in 53 schools on a full-time basis, where they provide intensive, ongoing case management to students identified as most at risk of dropping out.

More than 80 local service agencies collaborate with CIS to bring their services into the schools, helping to remove the obstacles that might keep a student like Sarah from graduating.

We’re proud of what we’ve accomplished in Tarrant County, and it’s one reason CIS leaders from all across the country are gathered in Fort Worth this week to trade ideas, seek inspiration and get better at what we do.

By mobilizing the whole community to support at-risk students, we’ve proven that we can boost graduation rates far above the national average.

This story was originally published January 19, 2016 at 5:24 PM with the headline "Communities in Schools brings help, boosts graduation rates."