While the blog is on summer vacation, we’re sharing past posts about the many ways City Connects helps students thrive.
This week’s post focuses on City Connects in Minnesota, Indiana, and Ohio.
“Strengthening the historic community at the St. Peter Claver School”
In Minnesota, Coordinator Sarah Jackson works at St. Peter Claver School. The school was built in 1950s in the Rondo neighborhood of St. Paul. This historically black neighborhood was disrupted by highway construction in the 1960s. The project closed businesses and forced hundreds of families to move out of Rondo.
Today, 98 percent of the school’s 90 students are black and come from all over the city.
Part of Jackson’s work now is to connect to community partners that can help her students feel seen and represented.
“It’s one of the few schools that kids can go to where they’re not the minority. It’s a place where students can be themselves and feel comfortable and thrive,” Jackson says. “It’s a big family, and the community that kids build here is pretty awesome.”
“Raising parents’ voices in Gary, Indiana”
When Valerie Oliveras started working as the City Connects Coordinator at Banneker at Marquette Elementary School in Gary, Indiana, there was no parent-teacher organization at the school. So Oliveras set out to get to know families and elevate their voices in the school, creating a system that worked for the community.
How did she start? By simplifying what she did at the school. “I’m just here to be helpful,” Oliveras told parents. “That’s my job. I’m the Banneker school’s helper, and that will look different for every family.”
“Ohio’s lieutenant governor visits a City Connects program – and calls on his state to invest in students’ success”
In 2019, then-lieutenant governor John Husted visited a City Connects school in a bid to increase funding for student support.
Husted and other state officials, including then-Superintendent of Public Instruction Paolo DeMaria, visited Chaminade Julienne Catholic High School in Dayton to see City Connects in action.
Husted was encouraging his state to increase its investment in students’ success. Husted, who is now a U.S. senator from Ohio, told the Daily News, “We know that additional resources for wraparound services that help students overcome the social-emotional challenges they face is critical to helping them have academic success… This is the direction Ohio is going educationally.”
Husted also said that Ohio wants to help students “overcome their life challenges so that they are in a position to succeed academically and in life. We put Ohio, frankly, in a leadership role in the country. And we want to use successful models that are already out there to help other schools with stand up programs like this that we know are working.”
