Strengthening Schools by Strengthening Families

“Higher
performing
schools can
understand
the problem,
organize
themselves to
respond, and
bring in the
resources if they
need them.”
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what’s happening in the classroom, and what kinds of support a family might need. The schools have
tools and resources to do that in ways they haven’t before.”
“Higher performing schools can understand the problem, organize themselves to respond, and bring
in the resources if they need them,” she adds.
Nonetheless, many professionals in the child welfare field, including leaders and staff of nonprofit
social service organizations and some of the city’s child protective services investigators interviewed for
this report, say there are far too many schools where staff is either overstretched or poorly organized for
the difficult work of family and community engagement—especially in low-income neighborhoods,
where the need is greatest.
“It’s punitive what happens here in the Bronx,” says Stephenson-Valcourt of Leake & Watts. “There’s
often no relationship between the school and the parent. There’s often no compassion.” She and others
argue that some schools are too quick to give up on parents and families.
Establishing trust and building relationships with families is central, says Anstiss Agnew, executive
director of Forestdale Inc., a foster care and preventive family support agency in Queens. In some
communities, parents are skittish about working with or even visiting schools. “Parents are easily
intimidated by teachers and security guards,” says Agnew. “Schools can be a forbidding place for
impoverished and immigrant families.”
Richard Herstein, who oversees school-based mental health programs for the Children’s Aid
Society, says many school principals want to find a way to more easily link families to legal
services, housing help, and benefits advocacy. If schools can learn to bring concrete assistance to
families, they can help win their trust.
New York has a remarkable infrastructure to build on, including a large network of communitybased
organizations that serve families and children. The city’s Administration for Children’s Services
(ACS) contracts with nonprofit organizations to provide more than $195 million in preventive
family support services each year. Most of these services target families who have been investigated
on suspicion of abuse or neglect; currently, the city reports there are more than 40,000 children in
families receiving some kind of preventive service under an ACS contract.
Medicaid funds hundreds of millions of dollars worth of services provided by community-based
mental health clinics. The city spends millions more on nonprofit-run food assistance programs, case
management, homelessness prevention, legal services and more. And the Department of Youth and
Community Development (DYCD) oversees $123 million in after school programs and services, most
of it provided under contract by community organizations.
Most of these DYCD-funded organizations offer programs inside school buildings. A few have
social work services, including 16 that integrate ACS-funded preventive family support services and
counseling into neighborhood “Beacon Schools,” which also offer recreation, youth development
programs, adult education and other services during evening and weekend hours.
These relationships have particular objectives, and outreach to families is usually just one on a long
list—if it’s there at all. The Beacon School social work programs seek family involvement. And some
especially ambitious organizations, like Harlem Children’s Zone, devote tremendous resources to
working with entire families. On a more modest scale, the same is true with Children’s Aid Society’s
clinics and community schools, as with each of the three other programs described on the following
pages. But most after-school programs do not.