“We have a partnership with a regional food bank,” a principal once told me on a school visit. “Each Friday, every eligible student gets a red backpack full of food for the weekend. … And when the parents show up (to refill the backpack each week), a reading specialist leads a 20-minute program on tactics for oral reading fluency and comprehension … and provides them with both a take home cheat sheet and additional materials.”

I was intrigued. This was an innovative approach to tackling food insecurity — a chronic problem in schools that serve economically disadvantaged students — but also to engaging parents in their children’s education. “What improvement in student reading are you seeing?” I asked.

Here is where my heart sank. The school had not been tracking any specific data, beyond anecdotes of grateful families. As a charter school authorizer, I love tales of happy parents and well-fed children, but more is needed to evaluate the success of critical supports: credible, replicable data and evidence. Out of this conversation arose what would become known as Active Ingredients: a project, launched in 2017 with funding from the Walton Family Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, aimed at helping schools develop systems for measuring and reporting the success of supports — such as wraparound services, community partnerships, service projects, and social-emotional learning — in driving meaningful student learning.

At its start, the State University of New York Charter Schools Institute convened authorizers, content experts, educators, leaders and policy advocates to explore the idea and create a draft framework that would guide the implementation of a pilot project. Schools wouldn’t necessarily have to create new Active Ingredients to take part. But while many already had supports such as wraparound services in place, they didn’t have clear desired student outcomes or credible ways to measure them. Through this project, we intended to provide schools with the ability to develop these measures and communicate them to their authorizer and other stakeholders in the language they understand: scientifically valid and replicable data.

Through the project, Broome Street learned that 85 percent of students are aware of mental health treatment and, importantly, that most were “counseling-ready.” This openness to social work has allowed the school to enhance its program by adding more consistent outreach and, through new survey tools, the ability to ask better and more thoughtful questions about students’ well-being. Together, this information and data shaped the school’s post-quarantine plans for expanding counseling and services to all students. Today, as a result of the project, more students are seeking support from a mental health professional on their own, on a regular basis.

Read the full article about mental health supports by Susie Miller Carello at The 74.