Travis County Commissioners Court
August 8, 2006
Item 5
Number five is to consider and take appropriate action on briefing from the Travis County collaborative after school partnership regarding performance of the Travis County after school care services contract.
>> good morning. We are here morning to present a briefing on the Travis County after school program. I have with me shirley justice who represents the Austin independent school district and wheels have cereal night team the audience who are also participate ng that project. So without any further comments, I'll let her take over and provide us with information on the program.
>> good morning, judge, Commissioners. Thank you for letting me be here today. I'm going give you a very brief 84 view of how the year went and if you have any questions you can just fire away. We served exactly 1078 students. The majority of those student attended both smes semesters and were considering returning students. Most of the statistics we kept, we it tried to narrow it down to our core participants so we could see what times of meaningful outcomes we had with the kids who attended over a period of time and we defined the core participants by looking at students who attended 11 days or more during one semester. We provided a broad array of services including mentoring, tutoring, fine arts, youth development, community service, sports and technology. As far as our outcomes go, we divide it into three categories, academics, behavior and school attendance. Our core participants had higher passing rates on the taks test than did our non-participants. The exception to that was eighth grade at pierce, and those students went on and graduated, most of them, I hope, so we hope to do better with our eighth graders next year. The core participants did not increase their taks scores from one year to the next, and I wanted to explain why that may have happened. Number one is that we continuously seek and provide intervention to student who are failing.
>> and also the taks test also gets pore difficult every year -- more difficult every year, so students may do really well one year and then the next year, because the skill level is more intense or harder, the next year more difficult, then it they may actually go down. But being I believe to compare participants to non-participants, we actually did a good job of preparing the students who participated in our program for the taks. And I will add that these schools have a lot of challenges sork comparing our participants to the other participants is a good way to look at our success. The majority of our students that were surveyed feel like that this program does help them did better in school and helps them make better grades. On our behavior outcomes, the incidents among students, our core participants who participated -- the students that participated in 2004 and 2005 and the other group of students who participated in 2005-2006 actually did not do as well in aggressive, verbal or physical aggression. Now, this is not necessarily the same group of kids, it's just the totality of the group. And also once again because we do accept the students who are the most in trouble, we would expect sometimes for the kids who are getting the most in trouble to also be in our program. At webb, however, for incidents of just physical aggression and verbal aggression, the students who attended our programs both years, both the first and second year, their incidents of bad behavior actually improved. So if we can keep the kids there for a long period of time, we see that they actually do better as far as behavior goes. Is that clear? Mandatory and discretionary removals, the kids that are actually removed from school, our tiewnts actually do better than the campus as a whole, and what this indicates to us is because they are referred to our program and give thean as an alternative to being kicked out of school that once we engage them in our program then they don't have to be sent to the alternative learning center or suspended from school, they can actually come and participate in some of our programs and learn to do better. Our survey information, the students believe that the program helps them behave better in school, they believe it helps them work better with other students. It keeps them out of trouble and helps them avoid risky behavior. Now, the boys and girls club does a separate survey, and their survey, they do a pre and a post survey, and students indicated that their attitudes towards school improved, they went from 60% that believed that at the beginning of the year to 90%. They increased their tolerance towards others that went from 70% to 90%. The after school program helped them avoid risky behaviors, that went from 70% to 90% and it helped them distinguish between right and wrong and know the dips and make better choices. That also went from 70 to 90 percent. When we asked them if the after school program helped them increase their leadership skills, at the gypping of the year students said officer% of the students said yes and at the end 17 said no, it did not help them or 17% said yes. So we looked at that noons we got that nrms and we immediately beefed up our efforts to enhance their leadership skills by offering them more opportunities to be junior kind of camp counselors, junior leaders, help with the kids cafe and boys and girls club also has a keystone club, which is a leadership club, and we've increased our efforts to get students to participate in that, so we anticipate that to be better next year. All of our after school students attend school more frequently than non-participants, so that looked good all across the board. Now, what we learned from all thf is that we need to focus on getting more core participants. Students need to attend more often if we're going have an impact. If they're coming fewer than 11 days a semester, then it's going to be difficult for us to have an impact on them. So we're going to really focus on relationships, relationships, relationships. Everyone that works with the after school program is going to have a group that they are going to be responsible for, whether that has to do with getting their homework done or their tutoring or teaching them in enrichment class, they will be responsible for a group and there will be a lot more of that one on one intier action between the adults and the students. We are increasing the presence of boys and girls club at pierce. In general webb did a lot better than pierce did last year and one of the factors we believe is because we had a full blown, full service boys and girls club at webb. So this year we're taking some of the existing budget that has gone to just provide enrichment classes that aisd has done and we're going to give that to the boys and girls club so that they can have a full blown club. They're very, very good at establishing relationships and keeping kids engaged. They will be able to provide two full-time staff members at pierce, whereas before they were only providing a couple of part-time people. So I think we'll have a lot stronger group cohesion and we'll be able to engage those kids more frequently during the course of the year. We're going to limit the drop-in component that a lot of students think that it's optional if they can come to the after school program, and if something better comes along it could be a girlfriend or a boyfriend or it could just be something happening outside of school. They're going to have to make a commitment to be a part of the program, and we're really going to follow through to make sure that they fulfill their commitment and we're going to also be committed to making sure that they come more regularly. We are also taking some of the aisd portion of the budget and increasing the cis communities in schools presence after school. They currently do the mentoring program during the dairks and they have done some after school things, and we're going to kind of beef that up and get them more involved so that the students who are the most troubled students during the school day, they can carry that relationship into the after school hours. We're going to start each day with an academic component, and once again, this year we're not going to send the kids off to a tutor somewhere else in the school because a lot of those kids when they know they're going to go to tutoring, and we send them out of our program, they disappear and they don't make it to tutoring. So this time we're going to keep them contained for that academic component so that we can work more clesly with them on what their individuals needs on with our group leaders. We're going to more clearly align what we do with the school day. The school district has what they call an intervention plan where we should be able to tell -- if they're studying rocks and minerals during the day, then we want to be doing something related to rocks and minerals in the after school program. So we'll be able to look online and see what the school district is doing in the day and more closely align our program. And we will be providing training to all of our teachers and all of our vendors on how to did that. We also want to adopt -- we want to have and adopt an after school class program where an inschool teacher actually adopts a class. She or he may not teach the class, but we will encourage her student to attend that particular class that she or he knows will be good for them in the after school hours. Once again on bear we really think that focusing more on the relationship building and knowing these students more personally and more deeply will increase the positive behaviors that these student exhibit. We're going to hold the students more accountable for their behavior and ourselves for actually following through to make sure that we get the results that we want. I think also a stronger presence in the after school program with some of our partners with increase the positive behaviors in our student and once again we're to clearly align pierce's program with what wee feel has been very successful at webb and have the programs be more mirror images of each other. Now, that was very, very quick and I also want to mention that we have new staff coming on at web and pierce that we're very excited about. They understand the challenges that we've experienced this year and they're ready to attack them head on. I'm looking forward to the new year. That was a very, very quick summary of a very long report. There's a couple of announcements I would like to make that I think mr. Davis will be very excited about this because every time I'm here he asks me how are we going to expand this to other schools. Boys and girls club and Austin independent school district were very successful in seeking and obtaining some grants for five additional middle schools. That will include burnet, bedichek, porter, mendez and keeling. We also applied for some grants with the boys and girls club of south central Texas and received funding for martin and perez. We also will be having a fwoiz and girls club at johnston and akins. We took what mr. Davis said to heart that we wanted to have these programs expand and developed this partnership and we want after more money. And we really are very, very excited.
>> [one moment, please, for change in captioners] we tried to do a more thorough evaluation. We now have more information than we had last year and this report also shows us areas that we really need to work on. And I definitely think that you will see an improvement with the same type of report format. Over next year, because this is a really evaluation that really gave us real information.
>> I think some of the other changes that occurred, initially we were focusing on kids remain in this the program for three days or more. We have increased that also to 11 days, I think just the ---- not only evaluating the kids, but training that they are receiving, also we would expect in this population, we would expect those numbers to go up. These are the kids who are having the most difficulty in school. The ones that are generally referred for disciplinary issues, so -- so we are looking at the kids who are in most cases the worst in the school. Even though the numbers may not look as good, if you take an example the taks, the scores overall for the schools -- so even any increase that we are experiencing with our kids who are participating in the program, any improvement is actually really a big deal. It doesn't look like it is, you look at the numbers for the overall school, the numbers speak for themselves I think.
>> how much is teacher participation, especially with the type of academic tests that's required of persons. What I'm hearing is that aisd is really not placing the better instructors over in the schools that -- that probably need them the most. You have just got a real problem, it's almost like if you are over there, you are being punished for whatever and you really aren't in the -- in the school that -- that need the attention of -- of the holly or whatever -- I guess the instructors that -- that can do a good job, they just don't want to come to the east side. That's coming to me and I really don't know what the answer is as far as aisd is concerned, as far as assigning those teachers to the problem area schools. They said that would be a big improvement if the quality of teachers that could be assigned over there would actually go there. Now, I don't know how much factual that is. I have no basis of approving that. That's just been brought to my attention several times. Is that the quality of instruction -- instructors to increase the test scores aren't there. It's probably a lot of other related stuff there, too, but that is one situation that's been brought to my attention among 7 many. No response.
>> I really don't know how to respond to that.
>> the only response that I guess we could give is that we don't have -- we don't have control over the administration of the schools and hiring of teachers and their placement. We do have the structuring of the after school programs in how they meet those needs. We are quite aware that there are schools that are not equal as others, those are schools that we target with our funding. That's why it's so important that we continue to have that kind of effort in those schools. Where we can help, where we can make a change, that's what we do. We really can't respond to, you know, the superintendent's decision about placement of teachers in the schools.
>> low performing schools.
>> I will say that the teachers who teach in the after school program are generally the firecrackers, the go getters, the go the extra milers. After school program we have some terrific teachers.
>> some people working on the [indiscernible]
>> yeah.
>> thank you very much for the update.
>> thank you.
>> I would like to invite you to the -- annual breakfast of champions and also on September 27th, you will all receive an invitation to a middle school forum, sponsored by i.b.m., work family directions. And we will be talking about best practices in middle school programming. Thank you very, very much.
>> thank you.
>> thank you all.
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Last Modified:
Tuesday, August 8, 2006 8:14 PM