City Connects has a long history of supporting students and families, with decades of evidence pointing to wide-ranging and long-term positive impacts. Most of this evidence, however, comes from schools in urban settings. So when City Connects expanded to its first rural school district, researchers at the Mary E. Walsh Center for Thriving Children got to work examining how this evidence-based model of integrated student support would adapt to the strengths and needs of a rural community.
“The big question was ‘can this model work in the rural setting?’ Would they be able to find different resources to tap into and provide services for the students?” asked Jee Hun (Mike) Yoo, Evaluation Researcher at the Center for Thriving Children and lead author of this case study.
Mike and his colleague Katie Drucker studied the expansion of City Connects into the Metropolitan School District of Shakamak, Indiana. They found that despite a smaller and more spread-out population, City Connect Coordinators in Shakamak were able to connect students with 230 service partners and programs by the end of their third year.
“It was really encouraging to see how they were able to expand all of the partnerships within the community and also provide a good amount of services to the students, comparable to the state average in Indiana, which includes a lot of urban schools. So the answer to our big question was, yes, City Connects can work in a rural setting,” said Mike.
“I think that obviously in the larger communities there’s just a lot more services offered in all the different domains. But at the same time, I’ve been pleasantly surprised and pleased with all the services we really do have around here, too. There are a lot more than what I initially expected. And it feels like once you start digging, making those connections, and networking, you just find out more. So I think it’s all just a process and it’s going to look even different and better next year at this time,” one City Connects Coordinator in Shakamak told researchers.
Researchers found that Shakamak—a rural district with 670 students across an elementary and a junior-senior high school—drew on its strengths as a close-knit community to foster strong and innovative partnerships.
“Often in urban settings, City Connects coordinates services through partnerships with nonprofit organizations. In Shakamak, there were often more informal avenues to find services. For example, a Coordinator might post the need for donations on their personal social media and ask for community volunteers. Or the teachers, who were often members of the community, were motivated to go back to their community churches to find different programs they could offer students. It wasn’t always a systematized service, but the community found ways to offer services to students,” explained Mike. “Having a Coordinator embedded in the community was a critical piece of their success. She was able to connect with the families and enable the community to join in on the whole support movement.”
This community-wide effort has led to a plethora of important enrichment opportunities and critical support for students and families. Based on student interest information gathered by the City Connects Coordinator, the elementary school was able to start several new student clubs, including a LEGO club, gardening club, graphic design club, and book club. At the high school, students have been able to gain work-based learning experience through connections to internships and job shadowing programs, as well as a new school coffee shop that employs students. Meanwhile, Shakamak schools have begun hosting an annual resource fair that connects hundreds of parents to community partners to learn about programs that support students during the summer.
Over their first three years, City Connects Coordinators played a key role in building more connections between schools and families and assisted with the infrastructure needed to respond to crises. For example, one Coordinator worked with school staff to deliver food and water to families when a water treatment plant caught on fire.
“For us, the City Connects program has made a big difference in the culture, our connection with our community in this area. It has made the school become more of a hub for the community,” one Shakamak district administrator told researchers.
School staff shared that students are engaged in more activities, behaviors are improving, and more families are seeing the school as a source of support.
“When a system like City Connects is paired with the already existing strengths of a rural community, there is a real opportunity for a synergistic effect. It can help motivate a close-knit community to come together and provide the support students need. That’s what we’ve been seeing in the Shakamak community. The community engagement was already there, but it was enhanced with the City Connects system.”
To learn more about City Connects in Shakamak, access the full brief here.
