Leveraging Community College Innovations for Opportunity Youth: Reflections from Boston

By Kathy Hamilton, Boston PIC, and Kristin McSwain, Boston Opportunity Agenda

This plenary was a breath of fresh air for those of us who have been active in the Opportunity Youth and College Completion movements. It was so heartening to hear someone center stage at a national conference finally connecting work that, despite its interconnection, can become siloed.  In Boston, we play an active role in both movements.  Success Boston, our college completion initiative, is a seven-year-old, cross-sector, collective-impact, initiative with a programmatic component that provides postsecondary persistence coaches to 1,000 Boston Public Schools graduates at local colleges.  At the same time, several local HSE programs have adopted the Back-on-Track model, following HSE graduates into college with academic and social supports.  We are using both models as a foundation for the Boston OY work. Read more

Dismantling the School-to-Prison Pipeline Forum

While Boston has dramatically decreased dropout rates and increased graduation rates, there is still concern about the "school-to-prison pipeline," which young people can fall into when they drop out or are pushed out of school.  The impacts of school discipline and dropout on young men of color are particularly harsh. Local conversations on the issue have started. Massachusetts recently passed legislation that reforms discipline rules. The Boston Public Schools, working with students and advocates, has begun to re-engage dropouts and reform its code of conduct.

Join us in bringing the conversation to center stage on June 21.  The Opportunity Youth Collaborative and the Boston Public Schools invite you to a forum with Arnold Chandler and Tia Martinez of San Francisco's Forward Change.  They will describe the problem nationally and through a life course framework, identify key data points that districts and communities can leverage to change the patterns. Boston Public Schools Superintendent Tommy Chang is committed to this issue.  He will outline how the district is thinking about this issue and share plans for addressing it.