Melissa Bailey Photo
United Way VP Laoise King and schools wraparound chief Sue Weisselberg.
Officials announced the next five schools to receive extra social-emotional supports for kids — and pointed to a dramatic drop in behavior problems at Barnard School as an early sign that a new experiment is working.
Sue Weisselberg, the school system’s director of wraparound services, and Laoise King, vice president in charge of educational initiatives at the local branch of the United Way, shared the information at Monday night’s regular school board meeting at 54 Meadow St.
The duo oversees BOOST!, the school system’s three-year-old effort to address the social and emotional obstacles that hold kids back in the classroom.
The initiative helps schools identify students’ needs, then helps them hire not-for-profit partners to address those needs through after-school and in-school programming. The program launched in 2010 with five schools; it is now in place in 11 schools.
King pointed to promising early results at Barnard, where she said the number of times kids got sent to the office for behavioral problems plummeted from 750 to 70 over two years (comparing the same year-to-date period ending in March). She attributed that drop to new help from the Foundation for Arts and Trauma, which provided a drama therapists to work with kids in the 3rd, 7th and 8th grades. The drama therapists work for 10 to 15 minutes at a time with students who show “signs of distress,” which could be anything from laying a head down on a desk to “throwing a chair across the room,” King said. The therapy is meant to be preventative; students address their stress through play or creative writing so they can return to class and focus.
In addition to bringing in therapists, Barnard also reorganized its leadership team and implemented “positive behavioral interventions and supports,” rewarding kids for good behavior, Weisselberg noted.
Therapists from the Foundation for Arts and Trauma are now working in eight city schools through BOOST!, King said. Barnard got far more therapy resources than other BOOST! schools did, however, because the school applied for and won an extra $25,000 grant through United Way. That paid for therapists to visit the school 30 hours per week instead of the usual five.
BOOST! has a $650,000 annual budget, paid for by private fundraising, much of it from First Niagara Bank and United Way. Each school also gets a volunteer from the federal AmeriCorps VISTA program who works full-time to help coordinate social, emotional and recreational supports for students. The volunteers are paired with a school staffer who pledges to spend up to 50 percent of her time coordinating extracurricular offerings.
Sustainability has been a challenge: Schools get $30,000 the first year to kickstart relationships with not-for-profits; $10,000 the second year; and then no extra funding the third year. Not-for-profits are supposed to leverage the startup money into outside grants to continue the partnership. That hasn’t always happened: Wexler/Grant, for example, used BOOST! money to bring in two outside theater groups and the Foundation for Arts and Trauma, which provided a drama therapist for four hours a week. The second year, when BOOST! dropped its funding to $10,000, Wexler/Grant had to end its relationship with the theater troupes. The school held on to its drama therapist, but with curtailed hours — two hours per week instead of four.
King said BOOST! is still looking for long-term solutions to fund the services provided through BOOST!, especially the drama therapy, which is not reimbursable by Medicaid. A new trauma coalition is asking the state for $6.5 million to tackle the problem.
The next five BOOST! schools will be Roberto Clemente, King-Robinson, New Horizons, Lincoln-Bassett, and Quinnipiac School, King and Weisselberg announced. Other schools that have not been chosen for extra funding will have access to “BOOST! Lite.” That means schools will get access to tools like an “asset map” and a “needs assessment” that will help them formally think through which gaps in service they have and how to fill them.