Can grant-funded ‘full service community schools’ improve student outcomes in East St. Louis?

With the help of $5 million from the federal government, two elementary schools in East St. Louis District 189 will become “full service community schools ,” with the goal of improving students’ educational outcomes.

Avant and Officer elementary schools will each receive $500,000 annually over the next five years through ACT Now, a Chicago-based nonprofit organization that was awarded federal grants to partner with Illinois school districts and expand the community school model across the state. District 189 will match $100,000 annually for each school.

“Community schools are the key to making public education work, because it gives everybody a stake in the game,” Fedrick Ingram, secretary-treasurer of the American Federation of Teachers, said while visiting Avant Elementary Tuesday morning.

Community schools are public schools that partner with parents and community organizations to meet the unique needs of their neighborhoods by providing services like mental health support, food pantries, academic tutoring and before and after-school programs.

The aim is to improve academic outcomes by providing students and their families with access to critical services.

District 189 has been using the community school model “for quite some time” Superintendent Arthur Culver said.

“We know that our kids can only get the kind of education that they need and ... that they deserve, if we all work together,” Culver said.

With the additional dollars to become a “full service community school,” Avant Elementary will be able to provide more support to parents and build more community partnerships, according to Principal Quanshanda Nicholson.

Among the support the school aims to add are a food market, mental health services and financial literacy help for parents, Nicholson said.

“We want to make sure that we’re supporting the parents to help better support the students,” she added.

At both Avant and Officer elementary schools, the district will conduct a needs assessment and asset mapping to prioritize the use of grant funds, said Sydney Stigge-Kaufman, executive director of communications and strategic partnerships.

There are some neighborhoods and districts that don’t use the community school model simply because they have a lot of local resources that provide the services community schools do, said Dan Montgomery, president of the Illinois Federation of Teachers.

“So what do you have in a community school? You have a neighborhood school, which is, frankly, what every parent in this country wants and deserves, that their kid can go and learn at a neighborhood school that is safe and well-resourced,” Montgomery added.

“We use the school as a resource to help build and uplift that community,” he said. “It has great promise. It’s proven: kids do better. They learn better. Attendance is better, the whole nine yards.”

Avant Elementary is seeing that growth, according to Nicholson.

The school has gone from being a “targeted” school to a “commendable” school on the Illinois Report Card in recent years, and its proficiency rates have increased.

On the most recent report card results released last fall, the school’s English language arts growth percentile — which indicates the growth of students relative to their academic peers across the state — was 67.1 compared to the state average of 50. Its growth percentile in math was 64.3 compared to the state average of 50.

That puts Avant in the top five of more than 200 schools in southwestern Illinois in terms of academic growth.

The school also reduced its chronic absenteeism rate by 11% last year, Nicholson said.

It was also named one of America’s Healthiest Schools for 2024, being recognized in all nine categories from strengthening social-emotional health and learning to improving nutrition and food access.

The educators of District 189 know that students have a lot of adverse childhood experiences and live in an adverse community environment, Culver said.

“But we also know that their zip code cannot and will not determine their destiny,” he said. “Their destiny will be determined by how well we work together and the quality of education that we provide for our students.”