A University-School-Community Partnership to Expand Access to Out of School Time (OST) Programs

• In Event: A School-University Research Practice Partnership: Why, How, and What's Next

Abstract

This presentation will highlight one of CERI’s signature projects, a long-running collaboration between the district, university, city government and an area non-profit serving as a backbone organization. This project focuses on bridging in- and out of school time (OST) learning and aims to increase access, quality and dosage of OST programming (especially summer programs) for students of the district. The community-based backbone organization is a third-party vendor to the district and established the connective infrastructure that allowed hundreds of local afterschool and summer programs to start rostering enrollment data into a shared platform in collaboration with the school district. A research center at the university has served as the evaluator through this multi-phase project. This was an innovative undertaking; for the first time, district and city leaders could get an accurate accounting of which students in the district were participating in summer learning and afterschool programs.

This project reflects one of our partnership’s longest-standing collaborations. Now in its 10th year, the project helped catalyze our efforts to consolidate research permissions and data sharing in order to promote efficiencies. Instead of dozens of local afterschool and summer programs running their own evaluations and requesting the same data from the district, the study was consolidated under the backbone organization and run by the university. The university developed a report for the overall endeavor as well as each participating OST provider, bypassing the need for each provider to access their own data.

This project led to a key feature of CERI wherein the district provides data files spanning all ongoing projects within the university and a designated center at the university develops files specific to each PI with an IRB and RRB-approved project. This was a foundational efficiency: the district no longer needed to develop multiple redundant data files for each study and the university no longer needed to wait to receive those files from the district. The parameters for permissions are in place and the university has been entrusted to develop study-specific files using district data. This has also significantly increased our ability to share data with local providers about the students they serve in their programs, contributing to data utilization and informed iterations. This aspect of CERI emerged directly from the OST partnership.

The presentation will describe this progression as well as the particulars of collaborating not just between the district and the university but between a lead “backbone” non-profit representing dozens of area OST providers. Additionally, the presentation will identify ongoing challenges with sustaining the project including recent loss of ESSER funds and their impact on the local OST workforce, implications for the school district and how CERI is adapting to address these novel issues. Finally, we will briefly share several key findings for OST programs and youth engaging in the programming.

Authors

• Dylan E. Farmer, Southern Methodist University

• Annie Wright, Southern Methodist University

• Elisa Gallegos, Southern Methodist University

• Harvey Luna, Southern Methodist University

• Greg Macpherson, Big Thought

• Shannon Epner, Big Thought

• Kristina Cola, Big Thought

• Larry Featherston, Dallas Independent School District