HISD initiative aims to ease kids’ burdens outside class
District assigns specialists dedicated to connecting needy students to resources
In her first three semesters attending Houston ISD’s Booker T. Washington High School and its prized engineering program, Rebekah Hodge rode Metro buses for three hours across the city each day to campus, paying $7.50 in fares.
The costs quickly became burdensome for Rebekah’s mother and the family’s seven children, who skimped on food and went without a car to make ends meet. So, in early 2018, midway through her sophomore year, Rebekah approached
her school’s new wraparound resource specialist, Francisco Rivera, to ask for help getting a free bus pass.
When Rivera delivered, Rebekah returned with more requests: toothpaste, a towel, body wash, a winter coat. Time after time, Rivera came through.
“I don’t think there’s an amount of money that you can put on the impact that people like Mr. Rivera make in students’ lives,” said Rebekah, a soft-spoken rising senior with a 4.09 GPA and dreams of attending Rice University. “It’s not just about a bar of soap. It’s not just towels. It’s someone letting you know that they care about what’s happening in your life.”
Every school day, many of HISD’s 209,000 students come to school carrying immense burdens: hunger, homelessness, deported parents, drug-addicted caregivers. To combat those traumas, HISD leaders are implementing one of the nation’s biggest, boldest plans to address students’ non-academic needs, hoping happier, healthier children will perform better in the classroom.
By 2022, the nation’s seventh-largest district plans to employ about 300 staff members dedicated solely to children’s social and emotional well-being, placing them fulltime in HISD’s 280 campuses. When fully scaled, the initiative is expected to cost roughly $15 million in annual salaries and benefits.
The employees are expected to identify children need
ing support, coordinate with local community providers, pair families with resources and use a locally developed software platform to monitor impact. About 110 schools already house one wraparound resource specialist.
“I think it’s life-changing for a number of students,” HISD Trustee Rhonda Skillern-Jones said. “It’s groundbreaking that we’re moving toward this. The purpose of the program is amazing, the intricate details of it are amazing, and now the implementation has to be done correctly.”
HISD’s vision reflects an ongoing, national shift away from high-stakes, test-based accountability toward ensuring students feel comfortable, valued and prepared for class.
The district’s initiative, however, has encountered growing pains in its early days. Inconsistent implementation, high turnover among specialists and uneven buy-in from campus employees have bedeviled the program, according to district officials and data reviewed by the Houston Chronicle. HISD also replaced the administrator overseeing wraparound services and decided to slow the initiative’s expansion this spring.
“We’re going to continue to scale this up, but right now, we have an opportunity to sit down and reflect on what’s been working, what’s not been working and how do we make this better,” said HISD Chief Innovation Officer Rick Cruz, who recently took responsibility for the initiative.
Nationally, skepticism also remains about school districts’ ability to influence students’ lives outside the classroom. Programs similar to HISD’s initiative have had mixed effects on academic and behavioral outcomes, researchers have found.
“People will say, ‘Of course there’s good evidence that when kids feel more valued and safer, they’re better learners,’ but how you do that is actually pretty complicated,” said Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies for the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank. “It’s not just about buying a new curriculum or telling staff you’ re going to do X, Y and Z.”
’Hard, hard stories’
In the state’s largest school district, where about three-quarters of students qualify for free or reduced lunch, educators receive daily reminders of the challenges facing children.
At Wheatley High School, where about 30 percent of students do not graduate each year, teenagers desperately need mentors to provide positive influences often lacking at home, specialist Yvette Montgomery said.
On the city’s lower-income south side, some Lawson Middle School students walk up to two miles to campus through cold, rain and stifling humidity, unable to afford transportation or access city buses, specialist Kiffany Smith said.
At Sanchez Elementary School, a high-performing, high-poverty campus in Houston’s Greater East End, Hispanic families often cram together into clustered apartment complexes, fearful of evictions and immigration enforcement, specialist Alejandro Martinez said.
“They all have very hard, hard stories,” Martinez said. “Sometimes it’s like, ‘Wow, I don’t even know where to start.’ ”
Educators long have believed childhood traumas frequently go unattended, exacerbating achievement gaps. Compared to their wealthier peers, HISD’s “economically disadvantaged” students are about 20 percent less likely to read on grade level in elementary school and enroll in college immediately after graduation.
Adeeb Barqawi witnessed this phenomenon as a physics teacher at HISD’s Kashmere High School, which has failed to meet state academic standards for a record nine consecutive years. Tired, hungry, psychologically troubled children struggled to pay attention in class, much less learn high-level science concepts, he said.
Barqawi sought out community providers willing to offer food, shelter and free health care. He then connected students with those organizations, tracking his work on a computer spreadsheet.
After three years at Kashmere, Barqawi left the classroom in 2015 to create ProUnitas, a nonprofit that would expand his work pairing students with services.
“The students all had the highest aspirations to achieve, but some had support systems, some didn’t,” Barqawi said. “It was all just luck. So, how do we take that one or two or 10 steps further, in terms of at least systematizing this?”
Barqawi’s organization expanded into neighboring campuses, including an elementary and middle school that fed students into Kashmere High. Early data shows relatively little movement on attendance and mobility rates at those schools, with mixed changes in test scores.
Still, HISD officials were impressed with ProUnitas’ model. In November 2017, HISD board members passed a policy directing the district to create a framework for delivering wraparound services in all 280 schools by 2022.
Building support
Working off the ProUnitas approach and a Houston Endowment-funded study from the Boston Consulting Group, district officials crafted their initiative: One wraparound resource specialist would work at each HISD campus, serving as a conduit between students and service providers. Each principal would select his or her preferred specialist, primarily choosing internal applicants or outside candidates with backgrounds in social services. The average specialist would earn a salary of about $50,000.
Specialists also would use a web-based platform called Purple — developed by ProUnitas, which shifted its focus to software — as a case management system, tracking available providers and students receiving supports.
By placing specialists in schools, district officials believe local nonprofits benefit from a single point person at each campus. Previously, overburdened principals, administrators and teachers orchestrated sporadic efforts with social service providers.
“It looked different in every place, and in some places, the work wasn’t being done,” said Noelia Longoria, the district’s interim chief academic officer. “I think that’s the beauty of this: There are systematic ways to help and support.”
HISD hired its first 40 specialists during the 201718 school year, adding 75 in 2018-19.
On a recent Wednesday morning, Martinez offered a window into a coordinator’s day-to-day routine at Sanchez Elementary.
Dressed in a yellow Tshirt tucked into crisp blue jeans, Martinez started his day at the student drop-off line, watching for students appearing out-of-sorts. After the morning bell, he checked on several of the school’s neediest students, walking a fifth-grade boy with an upset stomach to the nurse’s office and delivering a pep talk to a frequently-absent fourthgrade girl anxious about an upcoming math test.
Later, Martinez recalled that a fast-talking 5-yearold, one of 11 children in his family, lacked school supplies. Martinez pulled the boy out of class, walked him down to an office, then pulled pencils, crayons, a notebook and scissors from a metal file cabinet.
In the late morning, while on lunch monitor duty, Martinez spotted a quiet girl whose cancer-stricken mother had not responded to his offers for assistance. Martinez scribbled out a quick note for the girl’s mother to call him, which she slipped between the pages of a children’s book.
“It’s all about providing them the resources and making them resourceful,” Martinez said of families at Sanchez Elementary. “But like everything, it takes patience. It doesn’t happen overnight.”
Different solutions
At each campus, wraparound resource specialists tailor various efforts to students’ needs.
Martinez said he works closely with apartment complex managers in his neighborhood, arranging methods for ensuring rent gets paid and families stay in their homes.
Smith brings counselors from Abundant Life Therapeutic Services of Texas to Lawson Middle twice weekly, where they work with students tackling anger management issues.
Montgomery pairs Wheatley High students with mentors from several local initiatives — Girls Inc., My Brother’s Keeper, Urban Enrichment Institute, Eyes On Me — and organizes on-site events with the Houston Food Bank.
“There’s always more I can be doing, but as far as our work with partnerships, counselors, providers, I feel we really go deep with the students we’re able to touch,” Montgomery said.
Using the Purple software, district officials can track students’ most common needs and the extent of employees’ work. In 2018-19, specialists logged about 90,000 student “check-ins” or observations, about 21,500 links between children and providers, and roughly 8,500 instances of providing direct resources. Homebased, health and psychological supports are the most common requests.
Cruz said the data allows the district to illustrate the challenges facing students in an unprecedented way. He envisions new possibilities for linking certain interventions with improvements in academic-related metrics, such as attendance, graduation and college completion rates.
“If we can paint the story around what needs there are and show how these resources are helping our students, then it becomes a lot easier to get the support, whether it’s monetary or organizations being willing to work with us,” Cruz said.
Houston ISD officials said they are at least three years away from comprehensively judging the success of the district’s wraparound initiative, though they believe anecdotal evidence already proves its worth.
Still, research on the impact of social and emotional learning remains relatively scant. In 2017, the national education research nonprofit Child Trends analyzed 19 studies examining the effects of structured wraparound programs in schools. Researchers found some initiatives produced largely positive outcomes on academics and behavior, while others resulted in no significant improvements.
‘Down to execution’
The researchers noted “high-quality implementation” is needed to ensure the success of wraparound models — which has challenged HISD at times.
District leaders said wraparound work is highly dependent on building relationships with students, families and community leaders. The district, however, struggled with turnover among wraparound specialists in the summer of 2018, with 13 of 40 staffers leaving their schools, according to payroll data.
Additionally, Purple software data reviewed by the Houston Chronicle shows inconsistent use of the tool, which could undermine efforts to evaluate the program’s impact. Some wraparound coordinators logged thousands of interventions this school year, while others input fewer than 250.
District leaders also conceded that some principals have not fully embraced the initiative, instead directing specialists to perform more menial tasks, such as lunch monitoring duty.
Notably, HISD’s model differs significantly from one of the highest-regarded wraparound initiatives, City Connects in Boston, which reached about 28,000 students in its 18th year. Unlike HISD, City Connects primarily works in elementary and middle schools, sets its coordinator-to-student ratio at 400to-1 and requires all specialists to have a master’s degree in school counseling or social work. The organization also expanded much more slowly, serving about 12 schools in its first decade.
“These all sound terrific, but they’re not all the same, and it all comes down to execution,” City Connects Executive Director Mary Walsh said.
HISD leaders plan to centralize more oversight of specialists in 2019-2020, which was left to principals in the past. District officials also plan to hire 30 specialists in 2019-2020, down from the original plan for 60.
As HISD refines its model, Rebekah Hodge said Rivera’s work as a wraparound resource specialist already has helped her build an impressive college résumé: president of the campus band, program manager of the school’s renowned rocketry project, recipient of a $5,000 CITGO Petroleum Corporation academic scholarship.
“I feel like there’s anything I can go to him with,” Rebekah said. “And he’ll be like, ‘Rebekah, I got you.’ ”