While the blog goes on summer vacation, we’ll spend the next weeks sharing past blog posts about how City Connects helps students thrive.
This week’s roundup looks at the importance of providing students with opportunities and enrichment programs.
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Student Success Includes Enrichment
May 4, 2017
At City Connects, we bring the right services to the right child at the right time.
A crucial step in this process is to clear away barriers to learning.
That’s why we make sure students have access to eye doctors, dental care, food, and clothes. We help students who are homeless, and we connect families to counseling services.
But this isn’t enough.
We also work hard to engage students by connecting them to prevention and enrichment programs, including:
• sports and physical activity
• before- and after-school programs
• music and drama classes, and
• arts programs
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Research shows the power of closing opportunity gaps
October 26, 2023
The distance between children who have a lot of advantages and children who don’t is often called the Opportunity Gap.
It’s a concept that Eric Dearing and his research team decided to explore, conducting a research study that reveals the tremendous potential of closing the gap by increasing opportunities.
Dearing is a professor of Applied Developmental Psychology in Boston College’s Lynch School of Education and Human Development and the new Executive Director of the Mary E. Walsh Center for Thriving Children, home to City Connects.
“To conduct our study, we made use of a longitudinal study called the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development,” Dearing says of the National Institute of Child Health and Development. “It’s a 26-year study that followed a cohort of children born in 1991 in 10 different sites around the United States.”
The NICHD researchers used an exceptionally rich set of assessments to look at the context of these children’s lives, including their homes, child care settings, communities, elementary schools, and afterschool programs.
“We took these gold standard measures and we used them to calculate the number of life opportunities that children experience,” Dearing says.
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Expanding students’ experiences through enrichment
April 5, 2024
At Catholic Central in Springfield, Ohio, City Connects Coordinators Shannon Baker and Rosie Bond help students with basic needs like food and clothes, and they are also passionate about exposing students to a wide array of enrichment activities.
“We see what interests our students,” Bond says. “And we’re lucky that our community is very interested in responding and supporting our students.”
At the heart of Baker’s and Bond’s work is the joy of creating opportunities for students. This is essential because we know that students need non-academic resources like food and clothes. They need academic resources. And they need access to the enrichment activities that let them try new things and learn about the larger world.
To do this, Baker and Bond connect teachers to community partners, help organize field trips, and go on some field trips to provide support.
