This includes offering basic parenting classes, fostering more meetings between parents and teachers and involving families in homework projects, field trips and other activities.
The approach appears to be working in Sabine Parish: From 20, graduation rates rose from 73 percent to 81.2 percent. Second, the model offers interventions to address barriers to learning and teaching, such as bringing support staff directly into the classroom to work with kids, and making better connections with and use of community resources to help struggling children and their families. First, it aims to consolidate and coordinate student and learning supports-the counseling services, school prevention and intervention programs, and community resources that tend to be fragmented and uncoordinated at many schools.
It targets the psychosocial and educational barriers to student success. They had developed a model called "the enabling component"-also referred to as "learning supports" by schools, districts and other entities that implement it. That's when Jackson's staff suggested that the school work with psychologists Howard Adelman, PhD, and Linda Taylor, PhD, who co-direct the University of California, Los Angeles, School Mental Health Project and the federally funded National Center for Mental Health in Schools. "We discovered we had carried our kids about as far as we could," says Jackson.Īfter speaking with the district's student assessment and support services department, he learned more about why: Many of these students faced significant personal roadblocks that prevented them from doing well in school, including overworked or absent parents, emotional problems, and drug and alcohol abuse. He instituted a remedial-learning program to catch and treat learning problems early, and soon, students' academic performance started to rise.īut at a certain point, that trajectory halted. In 2003, Sabine Parish-a poor, low-performing school district in rural Louisiana-hired Dorman Jackson as superintendent because of his reputation for raising test scores.