While the blog goes on summer vacation, we’ll spend the next weeks sharing past blog posts about how City Connects helps students succeed in school so they can succeed in life.
This week’s roundup looks at how City Connects Coordinators weave children and community members more firmly into the fabric of their schools.
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Building a Safe and Supportive Community at Boston’s Edison School
March 23, 2017
“We represent over 40 different countries and over the past two years, I have run the annual multicultural event, which has been a cool thing at the end of the year to celebrate diversity in our school,” Shelby Riley explained in a recent interview.
Riley is the one of the City Connects site coordinators in Boston’s Thomas Edison K-8 School, where nearly 60 percent of the Edison’s students come from disadvantaged homes, according to the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, and 49 percent are English Language Learners.
“With all that’s going on in our world, our families are very much affected by it,” Riley adds. “We had a lot of kids in fear of being deported.”
After brainstorming with Edison’s principal, Samantha Varano, Riley worked with a team of teachers to organize a multicultural event. It was based on a similar event done by one of the Edison’s community partners, EF (Education First).
Rather than feeding into fear, “we wanted to do more of the positive, the celebrating, and letting kids be proud.”
So, each classroom adopted a country that was represented by a student at the Edison.
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A City Connects Coordinator addresses bullying
November 15, 2018
Sadly, too many children in America are being bullied each year. According to stopbullying.gov, a federal government website managed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, between 25 percent and 33 percent of students have been bullied at school and most bullying happens in middle school.
Research shows that prevention is crucial. A 2001 study of two schools in Canada found that peers who intervene in bullying can stop it 57 percent of the time.
That’s why prevention is so important to City Connects Coordinators like C.J. McGowan.
For National Bullying Prevention Month, which was in October, McGowan, the coordinator at Ascension Catholic School, a K-8 school in Minneapolis, worked with teachers and other school staff to raise awareness by facilitating anti-bullying lessons and activities.
In one activity: “Everyone traced their foot on an orange piece of paper and cut out their footprint. And they wrote on it — or drew on it — what they would do, what they can do and will do to stop bullying.”
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A City Connects Coordinator shares her superpower: asking people for help
April 29, 2022
“People want to help. All you have to do is ask,” Kelly Moulin says.
Moulin is the City Connects coordinator at Southbridge Academy in Southbridge, Mass., and she is exceptionally good at asking for help and inspiring people to say yes.
Southbridge Academy is a PBIS school — meaning the school provides Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports – that has 40 students in grades 6 to 12 who have individual educational plans or who need more support.
Because the school community is so small, and Moulin isn’t shy, one thing she does is ask students for their input. Moulin sends out student interest surveys to get guidance from the kids on a number of issues.
“The top three things that the students listed on their interest survey were music, sports, and art,” Moulin says. Unfortunately, Southbridge Academy doesn’t have a full-time art teacher so Moulin asked the part-time teacher to help. “We did an age-appropriate version of ‘Brushes and Beverages’. We call it a ‘Paint and Sip’ party, and we provide soda, popcorn, and chips and free canvases and paint and brushes for the kids.”
A couple of students also said they were interested in boxing. So Moulin Googled “boxing” and “Southbridge” and found Uptown Boxing Gym, a nonprofit organization in Southbridge run by Dave DiGregorio. Confident that he would want to help, Moulin called him, and the gym became a City Connects community partner, offering discounts to students and helping them out with equipment.
