Spreading Student Support Across Massachusetts

*A version of this article first appeared on the City Connects blog, which is run by our Systemic Student Support Academy partners at Boston College’s Center for Thriving Children*

School-aged children in the United States only spend about 20 percent of their waking hours in school. Young people live full and robust lives outside the classroom, when they are at home and in their community. To truly support students in their academic and personal growth, educators need to understand who the child is beyond what they might see in school—their interests and strengths, their needs and lived experiences, the challenges they and their families may face.

Integrated Student Support is a systematic approach to understanding the strengths and needs of every student and connecting them to resources that support both. This could mean connecting a child and their family with out-of-school resources like physical or mental health care, housing assistance, or enrichment programs like dance classes or swim lessons. Within the school, having Integrated Student Supports helps educators build deeper connections in the classroom and create a culture of care and support. 

Connecting students with the resources they need to thrive has long-term positive impacts. Researchers at Boston College’s Center for Thriving Children have found that Integrated Student Support leads to lower rates of chronic absenteeism and grade retention, higher academic performance and engagement, and increased high school and post-secondary graduation rates when implementation is consistent with best practices. 

But how can schools and educators, who are already juggling so many responsibilities, implement this approach? It was questions like this that led to the development of the Systemic Student Support (S3) Academy, a joint venture between the Rennie Center, the Center for Thriving Children, and the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. 

Aligned to the National Guidelines on Integrated Student Support, the Academy brings together districts across Massachusetts to learn how to build a system of Integrated Student Support in their schools. Since launching in 2018, the S3 Academy has worked with more than 100 schools across more than 30 Massachusetts school districts. 

Through full Academy gatherings and individual coaching sessions over the course of three years, school teams learn how to do holistic student reviews, where they identify the strengths and needs of each child and create an individualized plan to support their growth and development. They also create a list of community resources and develop relationships with community partners.

“Schools are often providing support in a reactive way, like if a student is missing school, struggling with mental health concerns, or declining academically. S3 Academy helps schools flip the script. By reviewing every child, S3 teams can provide support in a proactive way and ensure no student is falling through the cracks. This approach also helps teams identify trends across classrooms and schools, which can ultimately help inform system-level change,” said Dr. Chad d’Entremont, Executive Director of the Rennie Center. 

Currently, 28 schools from 13 districts are taking part in the Academy across three cohort years, planning, piloting, and then scaling effective practices. Earlier this month, these S3 teams gathered together in person for an all-Academy event. We had a chance to catch up with representatives from a number of schools to hear about their experiences in S3.

Building a Strengths-Based Approach
Counselors from the Mendon-Upton Regional School District—which is taking part in their third and final year in S3—say their time in the Academy has led to a cultural shift, where educators and school staff have a strengths-based approach to supporting students. 

“One of our main goals was to get to know all our students. They’re coming to high school with a whole life and personal narrative, but we don’t know much about them. The S3 process helped us make connections with those students. Our high-performing students a lot of teachers knew, and our students who were lower performing or had behavioral issues, teachers knew. However, middle students could slip through the cracks. [With the S3 approach] we can catch many of them,” said Allison Towne, School Counselor at Nipmuc Regional High School in Upton.

“We learned we had to take the structure of S3 and make it fit for our community. Once we got it, it really feels sustainable now and something that’s integrated,” said Kerry Fagan, Adjustment Counselor at Nipmuc Regional High School. “The idea of the strengths-based culture is becoming embedded with everything we do.”

Supporting Every Student
With nearly 600 students and more than 30 teachers, Warren Elementary School in Ashland is using its time in the S3 Academy to establish and perfect the process of implementing Integrated Student Support in a large elementary school. 

“Our learnings came from logistics. We had to figure out how to help the students outside the classroom. How do we get the right people in the room and how do we share the information around the building, and from first grade to second grade. We worked through things and made changes. We had the belief system, we just had to build the logistics system to make it more successful,” said Leigh Tripp, First Grade Teacher at Warren Elementary in Ashland.

“When you do the review, you find a child flying under the radar. They may be doing well academically, but we may not know who their peers are or what their interests are. One student was excelling academically but was very, very shy, not speaking up and not making social relationships. We suggested play dates on the weekends; then, I started connecting with them, asking questions about how basketball was going. Then, I noticed they started sharing at morning meetings, started to share during academic times, and started to thrive,” said Kate Bauer, Second Grade Teacher at Warren Elementary in Ashland.

Creating Solutions that Work
With all four of its schools enrolled in the Academy, Winthrop Public Schools has made great strides over the past three years. The team at Winthrop Middle School describes a myriad of accomplishments including producing a handbook to guide all educators through the S3 process, offering dedicated professional development on supporting multilingual students, and forming connections with families.

“We identified all these students, and they need all this help. Three years later, I realized how much there is to help students and how we can support them. The greatest learning is that we can identify problems and identify solutions,” said Brianne McGann, Winthrop Middle School Teacher. “We also learned how important it is to engage families in this process. In our second year, I made it my mission to connect with every student’s family. It was a rewarding year because I learned so much more about them and how to support them.”

While school-wide changes are critical to any Integrated Student Support effort, it is often the individual impact on students that inspires the work to continue. McGann shared an inspiring story about one student who was struggling academically and socially. Through the S3 process, she was able to work with his family to discover more about his needs and connect him with a social skills group. 

“Six months later he had all As and Bs, was participating in class in more appropriate ways, and had more friends. If we hadn’t done this process, we wouldn’t have put together all the pieces this student was struggling with and wouldn’t have been able to help as well as we did,” McGann said.

To learn more about Rennie's work to support schools in building effective systems of student support contact Rennie Center Chief of Staff Elle Jansen.