In Youth Stat, ​“Green” & ​“Red” Kids On The Radar

Traumatized by a recent violent event, several Hillhouse High School students were skipping school, failing multiple classes and lashing out at their teachers and classmates.

So the adults in their lives gathered to hash out solutions.

The adults were meeting last Thursday, as they do every Thursday, in an innovative effort to steer kids out of trouble.

Hillhouse principals met with top district and city officials as well as representatives from community agencies for the weekly meeting of ​“Youth Stat,” a citywide initiative that connects students who need help with the right community resources — putting them on track to graduate, not drop out. After two teens were shot dead last April—one killed just days after reaching out for help—the Harp administration set up Youth Stat to allow teachers, administrators, social workers, cops, probation officers, and others to share information on students having a hard time and strategize how to address those problems.

The program, modeled on the police department’s Compstat data-sharing sessions, is being piloted this year at Hillhouse, a high school of 950 students divided this year into three separate academies, each with its own principal. Based on its success there, Youth Stat has been expanded to three other high schools — New Light, New Horizons and Hyde School — as well as a composite group of three middle schools — Ross/Woodward, Troup and Bishop Woods.

Students from all three Hillhouse academies are included in Youth Stat, so the team is working with a base group of 50 students, most of whom have repeated years of high school without racking up enough credits. The students have an average GPA of 1.5 and missed an average of 60 days of school last year. Last year, they received 54 suspensions and seven expulsions. Students need help dealing with challenges with reading, concerns about danger from neighborhood gangs, family conflict, homelessness and hunger.

“All of these sometimes go under the radar,” said Kermit Carolina, principal of Hillhouse’s academy for upperclassmen. If it comes up at a Youth Stat meeting that student is homeless, for example, ​“there’s someone in the room — street outreach worker or truancy officer — who goes to the house and reaches out to the parents and attempts to fix the situation so the kid can get back to the stable environment,” he said.

Hillhouse’s Youth Stat team developed specialized intervention plans for students last Thursday, which usually included some combination of academic support, community mentorship, job opportunity and counseling. Katrina Hawley, who chairs the school program, said she invites different combinations of agencies to the table after taking into account the individualized needs of each student.

“A community of young people are grieving and we have to be super supportive and super conscientious of figuring out different ways … they are finding support to deal with the difficulties of losing someone they are connected to,” said Gemma Joseph Lumpkin, who co-chairs Youth Stat with Jason Bartlett, the city’s youth services director. Youth Stat is ​“a way they can do that.”

Administrators said the program is working — the current Youth Stat cohort has nearly halved the number of suspensions and most have improved their grades from last term.

At The Table

Last Thursday, Hawley pulled up the profile of a student who refused to listen to authority figures and often verbally lashed out at teachers and administrators, resulting in suspensions. A representative from a youth development organization had worked with the student’s older siblings in the past and knew that their home situation was unstable — a likely contributor to the disciplinary issues.

Looking at that student’s grades using the comprehensive online PowerSchools tool, participants noted the student was close to failing English. But, as IDEA Academy Principal Fallon Daniels (pictured above) pointed out, the student had high standardized test scores in reading and read regularly outside of class. Poor grades did not mean the student could not handle the work.

Even so, the student was at ​“high risk for being overage and under-credited,” Lumpkin said. Daniels said administrators had started working with the student to take the English class online after-school using Odysseyware, an intervention tool to allow students to recover credits. In this case, the student was failing English because of ​“behavioral and emotional” issues, not academic ones, Daniels said. ​“Odysseyware picks up that [the student] is still learning” key concepts.

The psychologist in the room — Julie Keen from Integrated Wellness Group — offered to do a home visit, to gauge the parents’ interest in family therapy. Bartlett said he would reach out to a local artist about offering the student a paid internship for the summer. They updated the recommended plan of action, and then moved on to the next student.

Youth Stat relies on the connections of the people around the table to find creative plans to address individual situations. Team members input new data into Veoci, a secure software system that allows for real-time updates on factors including attendance, disciplinary records, academic reports and school conferences.

Administrators exhaust school-level interventions, including supporting teachers in the classroom and holding regular student support services team (SSST) meetings, said Zakiyyah Baker, principal of Hillhouse’s law, public safety and health academy.

“Once we get to the point where we’ve brought the child through the process and the school support is not working,” they seek out community support, she said.

At the start of the pilot, administrators separated students into four color-coded levels, with red, at the most urgent, indicating students with multiple serious indicators for dropping out, including poor attendance, involvement in violence, disciplinary problems in school, and poor academic records. Students coded green, the least urgent, were more likely to have higher GPAs, but known to have experienced a recent traumatic experience. In those cases, school administrators ​“stay involved and try to monitor what’s going on,” very early intervention to avoid further deterioration of the situation, Carolina said.

70 to 30 Absences

In total, the team last Thursday was able to discuss about the cases of five students over the course of two hours in the high school’s conference room.

“What was amazing to me is when the kid comes up and his profile is up … the amount of adults who already know that child,” Baker said. When a student’s name came up on the screen Thursday, often someone in the room had a personal relationship with him or her outside of the classroom.

One student was feeling apathetic about daily schoolwork, going through short spurts of achievement followed by long periods of withdrawal. The student was failing two courses and was close to dropping out and enrolling in adult education instead. ​“I don’t think adult ed is the answer,” Bartlett said. Instead, he and Lumpkin said, the student needed help dealing with deeper emotional issues as a consequence of grief, in conjunction with any academic support.

“The student goes to my church,” one district representative called out, and offered to serve as a mentor. Bartlett suggested that the district representative work with Dr. Keen to discuss the student’s mental health with the student’s family.

Teachers are crucial to the intervention process, especially when targeting students to include in Youth Stat, said Principal Baker. Looking at one student’s academic record, Baker noted the highest grades were in history, in part because that teacher has a talent for ​“working with students at their level.” Baker said she would reach out to the teacher and ask him to ​“work with other teachers” and share his techniques.

And Principal Daniels shared a success story — a student had missed almost 70 days of school last year, but so far has missed just under 30 days. The student is passing all classes, compared to failing last year, and is part of a school-based leadership group.

Daniels attributed the turnaround to several factors. Most simply, the student was chronically hungry, and is now getting food through the school. The IDEA Academy’s tiered reading intervention system targets students like this one who are ​“low on the spectrum for reading,” providing intensive support. The academy’s staff have also formed a support system to ensure the student keeps up attendance. ​“Every teacher, when they’re free during their prep…search to make sure [the student] is not cutting class,” Daniels said.

“Bruised”

Parents have been active, willing participants in Youth Stat, Baker said. But some students in her academy started off reluctant. Some of them are ​“bruised” from past interventions that failed to work or change their situations, she said. They need to know that the Youth Stat team will not give up on them and will be as innovative as possible in thinking up new plans.

“It’s life or death for students on that list,” Baker said.

Daniels said during her time as an administrator in Hartford, she had to go out to different institutions to ask for mentors for her students. ​“Now it’s all in the room,” she said. ​“Everyone is offering solutions in the room. We come back to the table and revisit if things work” or if they don’t.

Administrators say the program is showing visible signs of success. So far this year, no student has been expelled from Hillhouse; last year, seven students were expelled by the end of the second term, administrators said. Last year’s 54 suspensions have dropped to 25 so far this year. About 86 percent of students in the current cohort have either maintained a low number of suspensions or decreased those incidents.

About 73 percent have improved their grades from last term and about half have improved their attendance from last year.

Carolina said that is testament to the power of early intervention and citywide collaboration combined with a ​“laser-like focus” on individual students. He read aloud an e‑mail from the teacher of a student who had been failing his English course, until administrators reached out to him. After realizing that the problem was lack of motivation and not lack of knowledge, Carolina had a one-on-one conversation with the student about his academic expectations — to show the student his principal cared about his achievement. By the next marking period, the student had put in the effort to raise his grade to a 76 percent.

Without that individual focus, the student would otherwise ​“fly under the radar” and likely eventually drop out, Carolina said.

The next step: preparing resources for summer use so students are ​“not pressured into criminal activity,” Baker said. Many need financial resources, access to jobs or internships, in order to fulfill basic needs. Students involved in Youth Stat generally lack course credits toward graduation, and Baker said they could take online courses during the summer if they had access to personal computers. She is encouraging donations from the public.