Communities in Schools of Tennessee’s raison d’être aligns perfectly with the adage, “It takes a village to raise a child.”
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Bonnie Adams with some of her students
Founded locally in 2012 under the umbrella of the national Communities in Schools office, the organization works to solve some of the biggest hurdles to successful education that students experience by offering community-driven solutions.
CIS has subsidiaries in 25 states, in which focuses vary depending on the key issues affecting students in those communities. Locally, according to the State of Tennessee Department of Education, the 2017 to 2018 rate of chronic absenteeism was 13.3 percent. With a myriad of barriers like chronic illness and lack of basic needs (including transportation, clothing, nutrition, and housing), families across the state struggle to get children to school on a daily basis. That’s where CISTN comes in to aid schools.
As a CISTN site coordinator, Bonnie Adams spends a lot of time and energy thinking about absenteeism at Cumberland Elementary in North Nashville. Charged with identifying and mitigating issues surrounding attendance, she analyzes data, counsels students and families directly, and offers resources provided by local nonprofits, businesses, and individuals.
Cumberland Elementary is one of 18 schools in the Metro Nashville Public School system that CISTN services. Statewide there are an additional 48 schools, with 25 of those in Memphis. (Memphis has a separate local office). Funded through local school partnerships, state grants, and private business and individual donations, the organization has grown significantly in the last seven years. Due to a recent state grant for rural expansion, CIS added 23 new high schools across 15 counties in Tennessee.
Locally in Nashville, CISTN works closely with MNPS to identify the schools where their services are the most needed. Operating in partnership with MNPS Community Achieves, the organizations work hand in hand to identify needs and pool resources.
On-site coordinators, like Adams, are year-round, full-time employees assigned to a designated school. They garner day to day, first-hand experience in those communities to identify trends in issues that children are experiencing and are able to assess qualitative data. Empowered to create programming and access resources, they aid in relieving issues that students and their families face. While they serve the entire student population in many ways, they are also assigned a caseload of 10% of the highest need students. Those children then receive targeted programs and individual support throughout the year.
CIS Program Manager, Kawema explained,
“Site coordinators are there all day, every day and become very much a part of the school. They are always modeling kindness and they collect a lot of data. They really know what is happening. Not just in the school but across the city, across the district, across the state, as well as national trends.”
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Adams noticed trends in absenteeism last year, noting that certain children were repeatedly staying home due to illness, but upon further investigation discovered that they were avoiding school due to bullying. In response, she worked with administrators to institute a kindness campaign pledge signed by children, their families, and school staff to help hold everyone accountable. In addition, she noticed attendance falling off on the final days of each semester. She worked with the school to adjust the schedule to always hold holiday parties and Field Day on the very last day as an incentive to keep coming to school.
Site coordinators work with local organizations like Unicycle (a school uniform recycling program) to aid in outfitting students and their families who are in need of uniforms, hair products, and socks and underwear. They also coordinate with non-profits like Bridge Ministries to provide weekend meals to children whose families are without a permanent home.
They are also beacons of culture in the workplace, providing team-building exercises for school staff and offering moral support (sometimes in the form of pizza on a grueling day).
Adams described that focus of her work as, “making a happy, dynamic atmosphere so that not only staff and students are happy to be there, but families are happy to come into school and add support.”
For instance, last year she coordinated with Cheekwood to bring 150 students, family members, and staff on a field trip to the gardens, allowing an off-site experience to draw the community closer together. Not only did Cheekwood charter a bus and feed all attendees (even sending children home with extra food), they also took care of the time-consuming details (including permission slips), allowing school staff to enjoy themselves alongside the students.
When it comes to local businesses and organizations getting as involved with CISTN as Cheekwood does, there are plenty of examples of successful relationships. From local restaurants offering discounts to clothing stores holding shoe drives, there are many ways to get involved.
There are also more evolved relationships like that with Creative Artists Agency. As a longtime national and local partner, CAA not only puts on a yearly fundraiser benefitting CISTN (coming up in October at the Adventure Science Museum), they also co-produced a professional development program called “CAA Scholars” for eligible Kipp Collegiate High School students this past year. On a monthly basis, a cohort of employees and students would meet to cover career readiness topics. Other notable partners like AT&T and Tennessee College of Applied Technology have successfully offered similar professional programming. In addition, with the announcement of a robust local presence, Amazon recently donated a substantial financial gift of $106,000 to the organization.
Individuals can make a huge impact on students as well. There are plenty of opportunities for onsite volunteers, ranging from a lunch buddy program to a more formal reading clinic.
“Either of those opportunities are really important because students look forward to their volunteers coming in and it is an incentive for them to come to school,” says Program Director Allison D’Aurora. “Lunch is thirty minutes. It doesn’t take that much time and just means the world to the kids.”
Communities in Schools Tennessee, 615-727-1341; cistn.org
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