In Their Shoes: Concretizing the Impact of School Assignment Policy on Family and Community Access to Out-of-School Time Learning and Leisure Experiences

• In Event: Building Equitable Learning Ecosystems: Two Interdisciplinary, Sociotechnical Designs

Abstract

In this paper, we examine how a district and university partnered to address the impact of the district's historical school assignment policy on Black youth. In particular, we addressed the need to create more equitable access to and participation in the robust landscape of out-of-school time (OST) learning and leisure opportunities available in the community. Our town has been struggling with the inequity built into daily learning practices because of historical decisions made by civic leaders to integrate spaces of learning and leisure in response to Brown v. Board of Education (1954). In the late 1960s, it became one of the first midwestern towns to implement a school desegregation plan that called for the only school educating African American youth to close and youth from the school, over 97% Black, to get reassigned and bused to elementary schools in majority Caucasian census tracks. These school closure and assignment policies have had longitudinal impacts on youth, family, and geographic sub-communities' ability to participate in everyday activities such attending a school within walking distance, attending school with neighborhood friends, visiting the library, and attending afterschool programming at school. Equitably-placed civic infrastructure can combat these negative consequences.

In service of a more equitable learning ecosystem, our partnership implemented a family facing portal of all OST learning, sports, and leisure opportunities available to district youth through community partners focused on equitizing how the district communicates OST opportunities to families. The system requires all organizations seeking to work with the district's students to share programming information through the city's instance of the First Author’s learning platform, which the district shares with families through a variety of social sharing strategies.

Our paper and presentation will share a) the resultant real-time dashboard of equity in OST opportunity from the perspective of home census tract and school community, using indicators of cost, walkability, peer connection, and interest alignment, created through an analysis of the catalog of OST programming shared through the official district-sponsored community-facing portal of OST learning and leisure opportunities, from 2019 to 2022; b) the partnership's response to the dashboard in the form of an intentionally curated and communicated 2022-23 calendar of accessible OST programming across the community's parks, libraries, and community centers tuned to the schedules and interests of the district’s Black and Latinx families, and c) a pilot campaign in partnership with the city's Department of Community Services to ensure Black families enter the school year with youth registered for OST programming.

Authors

• Nichole D. Pinkard, Northwestern University
  Presenting Author

• Lee Hart, Evanston / Skokie School District 65
  Presenting Author