One caring adult — whether it be a teacher, another local educational agency staffer, administrator, bus driver or other classified staff — can be a tremendous force in the academic and emotional life of a struggling student. Using this knowledge, governance teams should be intentional about ensuring those meaningful and memorable — and sometimes even life-saving — staff-student connections take place. Every student is one caring adult away from being a success story.
Questions for boards to consider:
- How do we craft initiatives that bolster both academic and social-emotional outcomes?
- What mechanisms are in place to assist staff in identifying risky behaviors at school, online or at home?
- How are partnerships encouraged that allow experienced staffers to mentor colleagues seeking authentic connection with students in need?
- In what ways do we actively prioritize a sense of safety as a critical component of engagement between staff and students?
- How do we review and respond to key measurements of student engagement, such as data on attendance and dropout rates?
The importance of one caring adult was recently shared by an individual on the 1A radio show available on National Public Radio stations around the nation. Listeners were asked to share about the one caring adult that changed their lives:
“My fifth-grade teacher saved my life. I was functionally illiterate at that grade. She immediately recognized it. Other teachers had just passed me and never reached out to my parents. My small school had very little resources and my parents were both high school dropouts. They didn’t know how to help, but she stayed after school with me every single day and taught me to read that entire year. She saved me from a life of poverty and broke that cycle. I was an undiagnosed dyslexic student. Now I have been a teacher for 26 years and I’m a dyslexia therapist, trying to pass it on one student at a time.”