Out-of-School Time in Elev8 Community Schools: A First Look at Participation and Its Unique Contribution to Students' Experiences in School
Author: McClanahan, Wendy S.
Date: 2013-07-00
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: Community Schools,Middle School Students,Student Participation,Student Experience,Program Evaluation,Academic Achievement,After School Programs,Disadvantaged Youth,Low Income Groups,Demography,Racial Composition,Ethnic Groups,Instructional Program Divisions,Grade 8,Student Attitudes,Educational Attitudes,Educational Planning,Student Improvement,Partnerships in Education,Comparative Analysis,Program Effectiveness,Student Records,Surveys,Grade 5,Grade 6,Grade 7,Gender Differences

Community schools are an approach that has been adopted to respond to this educational crisis. By partnering with local agencies, community schools provide students and families with access to healthcare services, educational enhancement and recreational opportunities, family economic supports such as workforce development and income tax assistance, and other programming, like educational advocacy activities, leadership opportunities, child care, and others, to increase student outcomes and overall quality of life. In 2007, The Atlantic Philanthropies (Atlantic) made an investment in its first five community schools in the State of New Mexico. Over the years that followed, Atlantic invested in developing community schools in three additional locations--Chicago, Baltimore, and Oakland--totaling about 20 schools across all four regions. For this initiative, now known as Elev8, Atlantic selected agencies with deep local roots to serve as regional leads. Each of these grantees has developed and implemented flexible, full-service community school models in up to five schools, focusing on middle-grade students in low-performing schools in their region. Elev8 schools employ a team of Out-of-School Time (OST) staff, family advocates, medical professionals, a site director, and others, as dictated by their model. Since 2008, Atlantic's evaluation effort had focused on generating information to help create and sustain the strongest initiative possible. As a result, the first five years of the evaluation were designed to ensure that the model was robustly implemented, and to assist the local sites in utilizing evaluation information to strengthen their efforts. However, Atlantic and their grantees are now seeking to document how students fare in the program, and to contribute to the literature on community schools. With this in mind, the evaluation team set forth to explore what questions they could answer with the data they had in hand. As a significant investment is made in OST activities in Elev8 and other community school models, this report takes a preliminary look inside the &quot;black box&quot; of community schools, thereby providing important information to the field about the relative value of OST within a community school model. This study answers the following questions: (1) Who participates in OST in Elev8 schools? (2) What are their patterns of participation? (3) How do Elev8 OST participants compare to students in Elev8 schools who do not participate in Elev8 OST (called &quot;non-OST&quot; or &quot;non-participants&quot; in this report)? and (4) How is participation in Elev8 OST related to students' experiences of school? To answer these questions, they used data from three main sources: (1) Administrative records containing student demographic data; (2) OST participation data (the &quot;participation data&quot;); and (3) Self-report data from their annual survey of students in Elev8 schools. The following are appended: (1) Data Sources; (2) Survey Methodology; (3) Survey Measures; (4) Demographic Comparisons of Elev8 Participants with Non-Participants; and (5) Regression Analysis. [This report was prepared for The Atlantic Philanthropies by Research for Action and McClanahan Associates, Inc.]