Building Resilient Schools: Combating Poverty through Meeting the Needs of Students, Staff, and Families
Format
Individual Presentation
First Presenter's Institution
Bend-La Pine Schools
Second Presenter's Institution
Boise State University
Third Presenter's Institution
NA
Fourth Presenter's Institution
NA
Fifth Presenter's Institution
NA
Location
Session 3 (Scarbrough 1)
Strand #1
Academic Achievement & School Leadership
Strand #2
Social & Emotional Skills
Relevance
This presentation best support the Head strand with its emphasis on turning around low-performing schools, and ensuring those schools maintain that achievement over time. Our Resilient School model includes Students’ academic and social-emotional needs, Staffs’ professional and social-emotional needs, and students’ & families’ human needs.
This presentation also supports the Heart strand with its emphasis on social-emotional needs and resilience. Unique to this presentation is the emphasis on also meeting the professional and social-emotional needs of staff who work in high-poverty, high-trauma schools.
Brief Program Description
Resilient Schools provide a model of successful schools in communities impacted by poverty and trauma. The “net of resiliency” provided by these schools reduces the impacts of poverty by stabilizing families, continuously re-invigorating staff, and helping students find success in school and beyond. Participants will develop an understanding of the model and identify next steps in their school’s journey towards resiliency at a school-wide level.
Summary
Poverty may be the most critical issue facing our public schools, but we can not find a comprehensive school-wide model of excellence that brings the many areas of research on high-performing, high-poverty schools together into an actionable framework . In our work with high-poverty schools developing Cultures of Hope, the idea emerged that a school, itself, could be resilient. We conducted a survey of the research, combined this with our own experiences and observations in high-poverty schools around the country, and developed a model for understanding and being able to apply the essential elements of a school that fosters resilience for all.
Thus, our concept of a Resilient School was developed in an effort to provide a model of successful schools serving communities impacted by poverty. A Resilient School evidences five main outcomes: stabilization of families, closing of achievement gaps, increased graduation rates, postsecondary success of graduates, and maintenance of these outcomes over time.
Our model of a Resilient School addresses four essential components: the human needs of students and their families, the academic needs of students, the social-emotional needs of students, and the professional & social-emotional needs of teachers and school staffs. In this presentation, participants will learn about the research behind our model of the Resilient School, with a deep dive into schools that meet the human needs of students and their families through the use of a community resource center or network.
Our research reveals over 5,000 schools that are attempting to coordinate available services needed by families to meet their human needs. These schools help stabilize families and help keep students in school, learning effectively. These schools address absenteeism, family instability, illness, hunger and homelessness. These schools are getting to the heart of the debilitating effects of poverty and transforming both schools and communities. Participants will learn how to start these remarkable programs, how to fund them and how to make them work
Evidence
We are currently under contract for a book on the topic of Resilient Schools. To build the model of a resilient school, we have pulled together our own observations from work in Title I schools around the country and education research in the areas of academic needs of students; social-emotional needs of students, human needs of students and their families, and professional & social-emotional needs of teachers and school staffs. Over the past ten years, there has been an avalanche of research on school improvement, social-emotional learning, trauma, and resilience. What is needed is a way to make sense of this avalanche. We believe the concept of the Resilient School does just that, by creating an “airplane view” of the net of resiliency needed to change students’ lives for the better.
Biographical Sketch
Bob Barr is the former Dean of Education at Oregon State University and former Dean at Boise State University where he helped start the university’s first doctoral program and a new Center for School Improvement. He has authored/coauthored 12 books focused on successful high-poverty schools and school improvement. He has worked and researched in schools in over 40 states and continues to serve as a consultant to high-poverty schools and university research centers across the nation.
Emily Gibson is currently a Social-Emotional Learning Specialist in a high-poverty school in Central Oregon, implementing a Culture of Hope and trauma-informed practices. She has taught elementary and middle school for over 20 years, provided professional development for K-12 teachers in writing, SRSD, and differentiated instruction, and founded a charter school site for youth-at-risk. Since earning her doctorate in school improvement from Boise State University, Emily has worked as an instructional coach in high-poverty schools in the Pacific northwest.
Keyword Descriptors
Hope, Trauma-informed practice, poverty, social-emotional learning, school culture, resilience, school-improvement, high-performing/high-poverty schools
Presentation Year
2019
Start Date
3-4-2019 3:00 PM
End Date
3-4-2019 4:15 PM
Recommended Citation
Gibson, Emily L. and Barr, Robert D., "Building Resilient Schools: Combating Poverty through Meeting the Needs of Students, Staff, and Families" (2019). National Youth Advocacy and Resilience Conference. 22.
https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/nyar_savannah/2019/2019/22
Building Resilient Schools: Combating Poverty through Meeting the Needs of Students, Staff, and Families
Session 3 (Scarbrough 1)
Resilient Schools provide a model of successful schools in communities impacted by poverty and trauma. The “net of resiliency” provided by these schools reduces the impacts of poverty by stabilizing families, continuously re-invigorating staff, and helping students find success in school and beyond. Participants will develop an understanding of the model and identify next steps in their school’s journey towards resiliency at a school-wide level.
