001Hi, my name is Jamie Rine and I am the community schools program coordinator. Today we're sharing an update on the aligned futures committee. I am presenting today with Stacy Christensen and Latoya Holiday. I'm sharing the collaborative work that has been facilitated by Dr. Brad Sarin over this past year. The community schools initiative in Sun Prairie is led by the school district in partnership with the city of Sun Prairie and the Sun Prairie Community Schools 501c3 nonprofit organization. Throughout our screencast today, um we are going to share the purpose of community schools and the aligned futures committee, share the results of that committee and share with you some of our next steps. The aligned futures committee has um has the purpose to study the needs of our community, the expectations of our partners, and to align
002resources, values, goals to our common purpose and vision for some Prairie Community Schools. I want to thank all that participated in this committee over this past year. Thank you for sharing your time, energy, and expertise to create the work that we are presenting here today. So, how did we get here? Sun Prairie Community Schools started its work back in 2011 at two sites um at Westside Elementary and at Prairie Phoenix Academy. Since then, we have expanded um and currently eight of our 15 schools in Sun Prairie are implementing the community school strategy, four elementary and four secondary. and it's right here in the history and present state of community schools where we started the work of this committee back in April of 2024. From there, we drafted a revised purpose, identified and aligned common themes
003across the national community schools framework, the expectations from the board of education, the expectations from the city of Sun Prairie. We then identified key measures to define the metrics to measure impact in each of the three themes we identified. I'll now turn it over to Stacy to share the revised purpose statement. Hi, my name is Stacy Christensen. I'm the site coordinator at Northside Elementary and I've been in my position for three years. I'm going to share with you the updated purpose statement for community schools. The community school strategy transforms a school into a place where educators, local community members, families, and students work together to strengthen conditions for student learning and healthy development. As partners, they organize in and out of school resources, supports, and opportunities so that young people can thrive. Thank you, Stacy.
004As I mentioned in the timeline overview, this group looked at the community schools national research, the board of education's expectations and the agreements that we made with the city of Sun Prairie in our memorandum of understanding. We looked for where those cross together and created three themes that we then aligned metrics with. And at this point, I'll turn it over to Latoya to walk us through how each of these metrics uh come to life in this work. Thank you, Jamie. And hi, everyone. Um my name is Latoya Holidayiday uh former Sun Prairie board member um and current uh co-chair of this uh community schools executive committee and just been really excited to be engaged in this work with the line futures and be engaged in um the work of community schools for the number of
005years that I've been on the board um through the site leadership team and the executive committee. So I'm just really excited about where we're headed with this work um and really proud of of of the work that we've done so far. Um, so I'm just going to talk a little bit about um each theme and more importantly the metrics or the results that we're going to be looking at to gauge the extent to um that we're reaching these goals and the extent to which that we are um doing what we set out to do um in community schools. So theme one was around increasing student academic results through supporting confident and well-prepared students. Um, and in having conversations about this theme, um, or this idea, this goal that we have for ourselves, the key results
006that we're going to look at here are increase student program attendance for out of school time programs based on sitebased needs assessments. So, we're really looking at the extent to which um, students participating in our out of school time programs are increasing their attendance at school. Um and then also really looking and digging into these sightbased needs assessments in order to really assess and think about the particular needs um based on context because we know that each one of our schools um serves different demographics and has different needs. So we're really going to continue to hold these sitebased needs assessments as an important piece to thinking about uh the specific type of programming and how we want to meet the needs and address the needs at the specific site. The other metric that we're going
007to look at is improved academic outcomes for students in some Prairie Community Schools driven programs. Again, really targeting the students that are participating in our programs and really tracking though the data um to see that they are improving in their academic um performance um as a result of not only participating in community schools programs, but we know there are other um things that will be uh contributing to their success as well. But we really want to hone in on the kids that are attending our programs so that we can see that progress over time. Theme two um is around looking at creating equitable equitable environments that support engaged families and increase a sense of belonging. Again, a really important and critical area in community schools programming. And we're going to be looking at three different
008um metrics here to see results in this area. The first is to increase um some Prairie Community Schools driven family program attendance in programs identified as a need in school-based assessment. So again, we want to see an increase in families that are attending our programs and specifically uh connecting the programs that we're offering to the needsbased assessments for the school site. So again, programs may look very different across our sites because of the needs, the specific needs and the local needs of that context, but again, we're going to continue to track attendance for our families in those programs across sites with the goal of increasing that belonging and engagement um for our families in that participate in Sun Prairie Community Schools. Um our second metric that we're looking at is increase and maintain student sense
009of belonging at their school for students engaged in some prairie community schools driven out of school time programs. So looking at the students that are engaging in our out of schooltime programs and looking at our survey data to see that their sense of belonging is increasing that it is improving that they are having a greater connection with their school students in their schools and uh staff at their school and we would want to see that that uh information is being reported as favorable for students that are participating in our out of schooltime programs at our community school sites. And then finally, that families and caregivers identify community schools as a trusted resource on the annual parent caregiver survey. And so this is a a new question that we're going to be um adding to the
010annual survey again to specifically gauge the extent whether and the extent to which families at our community schools sites know and understand that community schools is a trusted resource for them um for whatever that they may be experiencing in their families or whatever situations they may be experiencing. So, we're really excited to be able to add this question so that we can use the data um to gauge how well we're reaching and how well uh families in our community schools know about the resources available to them. Our last theme is uh creating transformed schools through collaborative program solving so that our students, families, and neighborhoods thrive. Again, a really critical area and we have two specific metrics that we're looking at in this area. One is our decreased chronic absenteeism for students engaged in Sun
011Prairie Community Schools driven out of SC out of school time programs. And again, this is by site by program and then also looking at the whole school. And this one, as we know, as you all know, um we really honed in and focused on absenteeism this past year. And this is something that we're going to continue um to drive uh through our work in community schools because we know that community schools is there to support um and to supplement and to offer um additional help to uh increase academics for all of the students at school. And so we know that students need to be in school um in order to uh receive their learning. And so we've put a really um intense focus as a community schools community on absenteeism this past year and we
012saw some phenomenal phenomenal results from that work and we're continuing that work into into the future. And so we're going to be looking specifically at decreased chronic absenteeism. That's really hard to say a lot of times. Um for students that are engaged in our out of school time programs and we hope to see even greater results um as we push that work forward. And then the sec second metric here is the number of collaborative projects and initiatives with our community partners. Um as you all know the strength of community schools is the community and many of the programs and activities that we do are through partnerships and collaborations and we're looking to grow that. We're looking to expand our reach so that we can serve more families and students. And we're going to be measuring
013that by um looking at the number of new partnerships and the new projects that we're able to um implement in our community school sites. So over the past year, this align futures work has been really intense and really rewarding. um we really I think honed in on some specific uh metrics and goals and things that we're going to uh work towards as a collaborative community and community schools and our next steps are really important I think for the future of community schools and to ensure that we are um again staying aligned in our work and that we're focusing on the things that our three organizations collectively uh want to focus on. And so, uh, to really help us to pave that path forward, um, we have enlisted the help of, uh, Shaina Lewis, our legal
014counsel, to help us think about some of the legal questions, um, that we have surrounding how we should, uh, move forward and if and to what extent there are any changes that we need to make and think about. And so Shane is helping us to think about um our 501c3 as a separate entity and what that means for how we engage and interact on a legal level uh not only with the school district in terms of staffing and other things, but also in terms of the things that we as a board need to review on a regular basis, things that we should be thinking about and questions that we should be asking. Again, as we continue to grow as community schools in our programming and our reach, we want to make sure that um we're
015thinking about the important and critical uh pieces of how we operate so that we're doing things um in the right ways. Um she's also giving us just some feedback on our bylaws um and again our structure as an organization as a separate 501c3 but in conjunction with ourus with the city and with the school district. Um, this is a a unique but a unique circumstance uh how we're set up in terms of ourus with two other governmental entities. Not unheard of, but again, as community schools has grown, as our reach expands, we want to make sure that we're thinking about uh the right things and answering those critical questions. Uh now, as we move forward um to ensure um our our operations are uh uh where they need to be. Um and then lastly, Shaina
016is going to give us some legal advice on insurance needs of the organizations, community schools, um sponsors a lot of community uh events and things in the community uh at large. And we want to ensure that insurance is covered um the way that it needs to be and um that we are uh covering all of the areas that are required under the law, etc. are not that we haven't already, but again, as we continue to expand our reach, we continue to do more programming. We want to make sure that we're just reviewing things and ensuring that we're doing things uh in the right ways. So, really excited to get answers back from Shaina on questions that we've posed to her. Um and excited to move forward with this work. So, um I'm thank you for
017allowing me to be a part of the conversation and hopefully I'll see you all around very soon. Thank you so much, Latoya. And I want to thank the board for your continued leadership and support um for the leadership of our district in supporting community schools as well as our partners with the city of S Prairie. We look forward to uh answering your questions on Monday night. [Music]