Infusing CPN Elementary Schools with Resources

USC's Mascot, Cocky, visits James Simons Elementary

As Dwayne mentioned in his earlier post that summarized our last six months, the CPN Program Team is hard at work on our elementary school “resource infusion” strategy to provide additional supports to the four CPN Elementary Schools (Sanders-Clyde, James Simons, Mary Ford, and Chicora) that are designed to impact six key areas:

• Strengthening principal leadership
• Improving teaching quality
• Increasing parental involvement
• Ensuring that each school has high quality in-school supports like counseling, tutoring, healthcare, and behavioral supports
• Providing every child with opportunities for safe and outcomes-focused expanded learning opportunities and,
• Stabilizing sustainable funding for necessary programs and services

What’s the goal? By 2016, all four CPN elementary schools will be among the best in Charleston County, and will be models for other schools in the County who desire to dramatically and rapidly improve the educational achievements of the children they serve.

You can review our entire strategy in this 36-page presentation. (.pdf reader needed)

In the presentation, you’ll see a summary of our next steps, and we’ve already hit the ground running!

During February and March, 2011, we’re going onsite to the schools to get a detailed baseline for how the schools currently operate and to understand the unique strengths, challenges and resources within each school. At the same time, we’re taking all of the great “best practices” research that was done by graduate students from The Citadel and the College of Charleston last semester, combining it with input from local, regional and national experts, and creating an “Ideal CPN Elementary School” template.

Once we’ve got the baseline for each school and the vision of the “Ideal” end result, we’ll draft phased 3-year prioritized “resource infusion” plans for each school. Our commitment is to have those plans drafted by the end of April, 2011.

Next, we’ll seek community input and feedback on the plans in May, 2011 and then finalize them so that we can move to the next step: Identifying and selecting community-based partners to help us achieve success based on the unique plans for each school. These plans aren’t going to sit on the shelf, though. They will be designed to rapidly leverage each schools strengths and “infuse” resources to help them reach the ideal.

The CPN Team will be working hand-in-hand and side-by-side with the schools to implement the plans and put in place evidence-based programs. All of these programs will become part of the CPN Partner Pipeline as they work together to close the achievement gap, create a college-bound culture, and ensure that every child has the support and resources they need to succeed in school and life.

We welcome your comments and your feedback on our strategy, and look forward to continuing to provide you with updates as we move forward!

Warmly,

Laura Deaton, Managing Director