Community School: A bridge out of poverty
- May 1, 2015
- / Reggie Dogan
- / education
Many days it is all Monek and Eddie Galloway can do to get by.
The couple has two children — a kindergartener and a second-grader — at Weis Elementary off Pace Boulevard on Q Street.
Without a car, Monek walks her sons a few blocks from their West Yonge Street home to school, rain or shine.
She wakes before sunup every day to get her two children, Eddie Jr. and Jeremiah, ready for school. Her husband works part-time as a custodian.
When Weis Elementary School opens at 6:50 a.m., Galloway and her two boys, with baby Elijah in tow, arrive in time for breakfast. At 2:40 p.m., Galloway is waiting to gather them up for the trip home.
The school is their oasis in the real, daily struggle against the poverty they live in every day.
“I just love this school,” says Galloway, sitting in Weis’ cafeteria as students who made good grades enjoyed an afternoon ice cream party. “I wish it would go all the way to the 12th grade.”
Weis Elementary School is a stopgap for the Galloways.
Now a grant from the University of Central Florida could help Weis do and be more for the Galloways and hundreds of families like them in their neighborhood.
The $75,000 Community School grant — with $25,000 matching funds from the School District and Children’s Home Society — will bring the community-based model of service and intervention programs to Weis and the neighborhood surrounding the school.
The grant will be used to hire a director and evaluate the needs of the school and the community.
Tim Putman, executive director of the western division of the Children’s Home Society of Florida, took the lead in helping secure the Community School grant.
“A lot of what happens in Community in Schools is directing energies and resources to a specific focus and to a particular area,” Putman says. “We’re really looking at doing things differently and making a long-term impact.”
Escambia School Superintendent Malcolm Thomas says he is ready to shake things up at Weis, which has seen its state standardized test scores dip from a B in 2012 to a D last year.
“We’re going to rip up all the rules at Weis and try something new because I don’t think we have much to lose,” says Thomas. “We’ve tried the traditional way for years and the gaps in proficiency rates remain around 20 percent. I think we can get 20 percent from the luck of the draw.”
Creating a model
Weis’ Principal Holly Magee likes the idea of starting from scratch and creating a model school that is unique to this community.
One area that Magee and Thomas want put a premium on is parental engagement. Studies show that children whose parents are engaged and involved in their learning show progress on every level of schooling.
Magee realizes the challenges that many students face stem from problems rooted in family dynamics and dysfunction.
“We have wonderful parents, but education can’t always be a priority for so many of them because they have so many other needs to meet first,” Magee says. “When you don’t have food to feed your child and you don’t have a way to get them to places, those are a lot of obstacles to overcome.”
At Weis, where all of the 600 students enrolled qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, the daily struggle of families in poverty shows up at the door every day.
Take the Galloways, a family of five who barely survives and rarely makes ends meet.
They either ride the bus, rely on friends and family or walk to get around.
The biggest challenge, Monek said, is having enough to eat each day. An area grocery lets them get food on credit. The family looks forward to getting the Friday backpack of food provided by a local church to get through the weekend. They get clothes and toiletries from Weis school store.
It is families like the Galloways that the Community School concept hopes to provide a hand up out of poverty.
Part of the Community School could include providing day care, offering job training, tips on budgeting and balancing check books, taking care of health care, helping parents so they can help their children.
Magee says that some of the services Community School can provide are already in place at Weis, but they just need to be organized under one umbrella.
“We have so many great people who are helping our school, and it’s like all these arrows pointing in the right direction but they’re separate,” Magee says. “If we can put it all together, we can move the arrow a lot farther.”
Bringing in the village
Take, for example, First Baptist Church Pensacola. For about six years volunteers have been helping the school through “Backpack Buddies.”
Each week on Fridays, they stuff backpacks with food and snacks for children to take home to eat through the weekend.
In the Weis Store, the room is crammed with donated clothes, food, toys, school supplies and toiletries that the kids can buy with “Weis bucks,” play money they earn for good grades and behavior.
“It truly takes a village and that’s what we’re looking at doing by pulling the village in to help,” Magee says. “There are a lot of obstacles to overcome. At least we’ll be able to assist them.”
The disadvantages that poverty brings to a community and its resident are real and present at Weis.
Nestled in the midst of a neighborhood surrounded by mostly single-family or modular homes, Weis covers an entire block on the westside of Pensacola.
In the school’s ZIP code — 32505 — the median income of the nearly 29,000 residents is $28,489. The Pensacola average is $39,734, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Members of the village who will be partners in the Community School effort include Children’s Home Society, the University of West Florida, Sacred Heart Hospital, Escambia Community Clinics and Escambia County School District Title I representatives.
The planning phase for the Community School effort could take about a year, but organizers hope to finish it sooner, Putman says. He estimates it will cost between $300,000 to $500,000 a year to operate the Community School.
The concept includes myriad opportunities, including after-school programs, mentoring, job training, continuing education and health and wellness services for students, parents, teachers and community residents.
Chandra Smiley, executive director of the Escambia Community Clinics, said health care is a linchpin of the community plan.
Smiley says the timing was just right because the clinic can tap into $52 million allocated to coastal counties as part of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill payout. One of the things the money goes to is expanding primary care services.
“It’s an opportunity to collect and bring our resources to the school, not just for the students but for the whole community,” Smiley said. “It was a natural partnership and he reached out to us.”
Changing a culture
Thomas says the idea of a Community School concept has been in the works for a couple years. It started with discussions about creating a Promise Neighborhood Zone, a federally funded program that offer grants to improve neighborhoods, schools and student achievement in low-income areas.
Work still is under way to acquire a grant for a Promise Zone, but the Community School grant came to fruition at the right time and the right place.
If the Community School model at Weis is successful, Thomas hopes it could have application throughout the community.
Because the issue of poverty — and the education struggles that result from it — is not limited to Weis Elementary School.
More than two-thirds of students in Escambia County qualify for free or reduced-priced lunches, which mean that most of them come from low-income families.
The county’s poverty level as measured by the number of students who qualified for free or reduced-priced meals rose to 63.5 in 2014, up from 57 percent nearly a decade ago.
In Santa Rosa, 41.9 percent of students are eligible for free or reduced-priced meals.
Typically, the education debate comes down to two highly polarized camps; the one side that says you can’t fix education until you fix poverty, and the other “no excuses” camp says a good teacher can educate any child regardless of his or her income.
“I don’t talk about poverty as much anymore as I do a culture of low expectations,” Thomas said. “We have to shift the expectations of people in poverty — you can do better.”
One of the best ways to improve expectations of parents and to help children of poverty is to extend the school environment into the community.
That’s where the Community School can come in.
Florida’s first community school started at Orlando’s Evans High School in 2012. Calling it a “school” doesn’t do it justice.
It’s a partnership among the University of Central Florida, the Children’s Home Society, Evans High and other groups and agencies.
As a community school, Evans High became a central hub, or gathering spot, with a doctor’s office, dentist’s office, food bank and education center.
On any given day, community and school programs could be in full gear from 7 a.m. until 8:30 p.m.
The transformation extends to the classroom since the Community School arrived. Everything from graduation rates to parental involvement has improved. Evans High rose from an F school to a B in the three-year span.
Even though officials from Orlando’s community school program have been instrumental in helping get Pensacola’s program off the ground, what’s best for Weis will be determined locally.
Organizers do hope it will be an example of ways to combat poverty and show how communities can become a part of solution.
Putman believes this is the best opportunity to create what is needed for Escambia County and its schools, but stakeholders have to understand that they are all in this together.
“No single entity is going to have all the answers,” Putman says. “It is an opportunity and there really isn’t a magic wand, but there is a lot of work to be done and if we do it together, I believe we can improve things in this community.”
Take the Galloways, a family of five who barely survives and rarely makes ends meet.
They either ride the bus, rely on friends and family or walk to get around.
The biggest challenge, Monek said, is having enough to eat each day. An area grocery lets them get food on credit. The family looks forward to getting the Friday backpack of food provided by a local church to get through the weekend. They get clothes and toiletries from Weis school store.
It is families like the Galloways that the Community School concept hopes to provide a hand up out of poverty.
Part of the Community School could include providing day care, offering job training, tips on budgeting and balancing check books, taking care of health care, helping parents so they can help their children.
Magee says that some of the services Community School can provide are already in place at Weis, but they just need to be organized under one umbrella.
“We have so many great people who are helping our school, and it’s like all these arrows pointing in the right direction but they’re separate,” Magee says. “If we can put it all together, we can move the arrow a lot farther.”
Bringing in the village
Take, for example, First Baptist Church Pensacola. For about six years volunteers have been helping the school through “Backpack Buddies.”
Each week on Fridays, they stuff backpacks with food and snacks for children to take home to eat through the weekend.
In the Weis Store, the room is crammed with donated clothes, food, toys, school supplies and toiletries that the kids can buy with “Weis bucks,” play money they earn for good grades and behavior.
“It truly takes a village and that’s what we’re looking at doing by pulling the village in to help,” Magee says. “There are a lot of obstacles to overcome. At least we’ll be able to assist them.”
The disadvantages that poverty brings to a community and its resident are real and present at Weis.
Nestled in the midst of a neighborhood surrounded by mostly single-family or modular homes, Weis covers an entire block on the westside of Pensacola.
In the school’s ZIP code — 32505 — the median income of the nearly 29,000 residents is $28,489. The Pensacola average is $39,734, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Members of the village who will be partners in the Community School effort include Children’s Home Society, the University of West Florida, Sacred Heart Hospital, Escambia Community Clinics and Escambia County School District Title I representatives.
The planning phase for the Community School effort could take about a year, but organizers hope to finish it sooner, Putman says. He estimates it will cost between $300,000 to $500,000 a year to operate the Community School.
The concept includes myriad opportunities, including after-school programs, mentoring, job training, continuing education and health and wellness services for students, parents, teachers and community residents.
Chandra Smiley, executive director of the Escambia Community Clinics, said health care is a linchpin of the community plan.
Smiley says the timing was just right because the clinic can tap into $52 million allocated to coastal counties as part of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill payout. One of the things the money goes to is expanding primary care services.
“It’s an opportunity to collect and bring our resources to the school, not just for the students but for the whole community,” Smiley said. “It was a natural partnership and he reached out to us.”
Changing a culture
Thomas says the idea of a Community School concept has been in the works for a couple years. It started with discussions about creating a Promise Neighborhood Zone, a federally funded program that offer grants to improve neighborhoods, schools and student achievement in low-income areas.
Work still is under way to acquire a grant for a Promise Zone, but the Community School grant came to fruition at the right time and the right place.
If the Community School model at Weis is successful, Thomas hopes it could have application throughout the community.
Because the issue of poverty — and the education struggles that result from it — is not limited to Weis Elementary School.
More than two-thirds of students in Escambia County qualify for free or reduced-priced lunches, which mean that most of them come from low-income families.
The county’s poverty level as measured by the number of students who qualified for free or reduced-priced meals rose to 63.5 in 2014, up from 57 percent nearly a decade ago.
In Santa Rosa, 41.9 percent of students are eligible for free or reduced-priced meals.
Typically, the education debate comes down to two highly polarized camps; the one side that says you can’t fix education until you fix poverty, and the other “no excuses” camp says a good teacher can educate any child regardless of his or her income.
“I don’t talk about poverty as much anymore as I do a culture of low expectations,” Thomas said. “We have to shift the expectations of people in poverty — you can do better.”
One of the best ways to improve expectations of parents and to help children of poverty is to extend the school environment into the community.
That’s where the Community School can come in.
Florida’s first community school started at Orlando’s Evans High School in 2012. Calling it a “school” doesn’t do it justice.
It’s a partnership among the University of Central Florida, the Children’s Home Society, Evans High and other groups and agencies.
As a community school, Evans High became a central hub, or gathering spot, with a doctor’s office, dentist’s office, food bank and education center.
On any given day, community and school programs could be in full gear from 7 a.m. until 8:30 p.m.
The transformation extends to the classroom since the Community School arrived. Everything from graduation rates to parental involvement has improved. Evans High rose from an F school to a B in the three-year span.
Even though officials from Orlando’s community school program have been instrumental in helping get Pensacola’s program off the ground, what’s best for Weis will be determined locally.
Organizers do hope it will be an example of ways to combat poverty and show how communities can become a part of solution.
Putman believes this is the best opportunity to create what is needed for Escambia County and its schools, but stakeholders have to understand that they are all in this together.
“No single entity is going to have all the answers,” Putman says. “It is an opportunity and there really isn’t a magic wand, but there is a lot of work to be done and if we do it together, I believe we can improve things in this community.”
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