Leveraging Integrated Student Support for COVID-19-Related Needs for Students, Families, and Teachers in High-Poverty Schools

• In Event: The Cascading Educational Impacts of COVID-19

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic forced rapid school closures, foregrounding and exacerbating non-academic student and family needs stemming from long-standing inequities. Effective identification of needs and service provision for all students is challenging. Districts realize the necessity of support structures to organize resources and leverage relationships (Modan, 2020), but often lack the required infrastructure (Author, 2008), hindering responsiveness. To illuminate how to identify and meet needs, we examine the COVID-19 response of [Intervention], an evidenced-based (e.g., Author, 2014), integrated student support intervention that systematically identifies and addresses holistic needs of students in high-poverty, urban schools. We ask: (1) What COVID-19-related student and family needs arose; how did they evolve over the weeks and months of initial school closure? and (2) How does an integrated student support intervention leverage existing systematic practice, service delivery, and community partnerships to meet changing COVID-19-related needs?

We surveyed 89 intervention coordinators over 13 weeks from March through June 2020. Coordinators are full-time, in-school student support personnel who facilitate supports and enrichments tailored to each student’s developmental context across academic, socio-emotional, health, and family domains. Coordinators are from 94 high-poverty, mostly urban elementary schools in 11 districts in six U.S. states and served approximately 30,000 students and their families. Coordinators submitted weekly open-ended responses (n = 580) about their work responding to the needs of students/families and teachers/staff. Using lenses of child development (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006) and student support best-practice (ASCA, 2019; Author, 2008), we conducted thematic analysis (Braun & Clark, 2006) of open-ended responses to identify needs, changes over time, and how coordinators leveraged pre-existing practice. For triangulation, we used local intervention managers’ estimates of families’ technology, food, and housing needs; and records of student-level service provision in the intervention’s technology database.

Six themes characterize student, family, and school staff needs: Academic (e.g., schedules, online learning), Communication (e.g., resource information), COVID-19-related, Systems (e.g., protocol creation), Resources (e.g., food, housing), and Socio-emotional/behavioral (e.g., loss of social interactions). Some needs, like COVID-19 concerns, were consistent across time; others evolved. For example, in March, intense needs included laptops, Internet, food, and resource information. By May, financial, rent, and housing needs were more prominent.

Six themes show how coordinators leveraged their existing approach to quickly address crisis-oriented needs. Coordinators used pre-existing relationships to: identify and reach out to students, parents, staff, and community agencies; compile and distribute resource information to families; and work systematically to identify needs and coordinate resources. Coordinators adapted their role to directly support family needs (e.g., hand-delivering food and Chromebooks); directly meet student needs through individual, small group, and whole class interventions to support online learning; and were able to return to non-crisis-intervention core practices (e.g., record-keeping) a few weeks after closures.

Together, results illuminate the evolving effects of COVID-19 on students’ developmental contexts, how leveraging relationships and existing systems support education stakeholders, and how to facilitate student learning during COVID-19 and its aftereffects. Findings also elucidate effective practices for meeting non-academic needs that affect student learning that may arise in future systemic disruptions to schooling.

Authors

• Courtney Pollack, National Institutes of Health (NIH)
  Presenting Author

• Maria Theodorakakis, Boston College
  Non-Presenting Author

• Mary E. Walsh, Boston College
  Non-Presenting Author