Last week, we proudly welcomed the principals of the 10 City Connects schools in Dublin, Ireland, to meet with our staff at Boston College.
It was a wonderful chance to share ideas and strategies about how City Connects helps schools understand and address the needs and interests of their students.
The principals visited several local Catholic and public schools in Boston that implement City Connects, shared their own City Connects experiences, and talked about how to better engage families, teachers, and the community in providing students with systematic support.
One of the most inspiring sessions was a discussion on implementing City Connects in large cities that occurred between the Dublin principals and Daniel Warwick, Superintendent of the Springfield Public Schools in Massachusetts. Warwick was joined by Jessica Davila, the principal of Springfield’s Alice B. Beal School, and Stephanie Sanabria, Springfield’s City Connects Program Manager.
Springfield and Dublin share similar themes. City Connects staff love the work of getting to know students and helping them thrive. There is great joy in seeing students learn, succeed, and surprise themselves.
However, both Boston and Dublin face poverty’s unrelenting toll.
Dublin runs City Connects in its North East Inner City. Dublin’s City Connects Program Manager Gerry Cullen calls this “a high deprivation area,” where the community is working hard to address common urban problems, including crime, substance abuse, and homelessness through better integration of resources and stronger connections to government services.
In Springfield, where City Connects is in 42 of the city’s 66 schools, 85 percent of students are low-income, 89.3 percent have “high needs,” and 28.6 percent speak a first language that is not English.
City Connects Executive Director Mary Walsh said tackling these challenges requires leaders who understand the importance of providing students with academic support and non-academic support.
One insight that Springfield Superintendent Warwick shared is that City Connects – which is in Springfield’s preschools and its elementary, middle, and high schools – has, along with other support programs, helped lower dropout rates and increase graduation rates.
“If they’re hungry, they are not going to learn,” Dublin and Springfield educators agreed, summing up how non-academic obstacles affect students. Leaders often don’t understand how important it is to be ready to learn — and what it takes for students to achieve that readiness.
Walsh added that in the United States, leadership tends to swing to extremes. Sometimes policies focus solely on academics. In the wake of the pandemic, policies are focusing heavily on students’ mental health needs. Both are important, Walsh says, and leaders have to strike a balance, as Warwick has done in Springfield.
Establishing this balance will mean helping more policy leaders better understand students’ lives and the importance of providing wraparound services like City Connects’ model of integrated student support that prepare students to engage in learning.
Both Dublin and Springfield also have students from immigrant communities whose first language isn’t English. In both cities, engaging families is part of boosting students’ success. And in both cities, there’s a desire to build teachers’ cultural capacity and to add faculty members with diverse backgrounds so that students can have more teachers with whom they share a cultural background.
One insight that Springfield Superintendent Warwick shared is that City Connects – which is in Springfield’s preschools and its elementary, middle, and high schools – has, along with other support programs, helped lower dropout rates and increase graduation rates.
The visiting principals came away with fresh ideas to bring back to their schools and to educators in Ireland. The principals would like to see the program expand into higher grades. They would also like to expand the enrichment programs they offer students, noting that enrichment can support positive mental health and give students an opportunity to learn about themselves by trying out new activities.
The visit was a stirring reminder that in contexts as different as Springfield, Mass., and Dublin, Ireland, integrated student support plays a critical role in combating the effects of poverty and opening up doors of opportunity.
