NAA Education Group Breakout Session #1

Friday, September 25^th, 2020

Attendees: BJ Walker, Don Barr, Josh Rubin, Maria Gagnon, Matthew Henry, Matthew Tinsley, Adrienne Young, Duane Brown, Elle Gemma Gruver, Cecile Herledan

Missing: Karthik Balakrishnan, Michael Vente

1. SDOH Discussion

• Read the definition to the group, but did not discuss. Everyone seemed in agreement.
• Particularly in the early childhood and schooling, children will be seeing physicians. What is the role of the physician in connecting with the educational system, to communicate if the child is high risk or in need of some assistance?
• High stress situations at home can impact neural development in early childhood.
• Nurse home visiting great universal strategy, but needs to be normalized.
  • Only for worse off families get it now
  • Puts people into buckets good/bad
  • Every parent could benefit
  • In Santa Clara county, trying to imagine what an appropriately supportive life course framework would look like around child development  conclusion is universal home visiting program starts prenatally and extends to preschool enrollment.
    • Provided for worse off families
  • The US does not have a shared set of values. And no political will to balance the scale. We don’t have agreements on the fundamental core values.
    • NAA or workgroup come up with set of shared values?

What is the goal? How do we measure success?

• Is it graduation? Post-secondary education? Employment? What are the specific measures of systemic change?
• Not focusing on only academic learning, but also social and emotional learning should be increasingly incorporated in to the classroom. They are lacking those strengths and skills that are hindering them from succeeding. There is a movement to incorporate that.

Parenting

• Assumption that people know how to parent  problematic and leads to adverse childhood events
• Education opportunities for the parents, learning about child development, nutrition etc. when the child is at the early stage
• How do we not perpetuate the inadequacies? Who is deciding what is good parenting? Different cultures? Different ideas and opinion regarding parenting?
• Intersection of poverty and toxic parenting, lots of kids grow up in poverty with supportive parents. Many parents learn parenting from their own parents.
• What is the approach to that? How do we break the cycle with the next generation or heal parents who were once children subject to poor parenting?
• ACE screening on OB patients. Opportunities to help and empower.
• Children get disproportionately taken from black families.

Universal Education System

• We don’t have a universal public structure for early education. K12 education is essentially a structure starting at age 5. More rational system would provide for early education.
• Entitlement for k-12 and higher ed space, why haven’t we talked entitlement for early education? Entitlement services should be provided before birth children don’t begin learning at 5, but either prenatally or at birth.
• When we talk about universalism, how do we get universal quality?? The problem CBO’s have is that they don’t have access to the development and understandings of how you create a system that is of quality. We have a universal education system, but it is woefully inadequate. If we are talking about the social determinant space, what makes the inadequacy of the system?
  • The inequities in the education system come from how it is funded. With Covid, the students who most need schools to provide computers are the schools that have the least resources to do it due to the communities funding.
    • You are going to find students in each community that are not doing as well (Black and brown students). Something else must be mattering in addition to money.

CBO’s and Probation

• What is often missing is CBO’s that are providing on the ground services to students or children, so as we think about building data structures that are interoperable how do we account for variability in CBO’s?
• Probation often forget probation kids, how can we ensure we are serving probation students well?

Data

• Is there data out there already that is available, but not tapped that we should be bringing as an answer to this question (3) as indicators for systematic change. What is an exercise to look through those data sources and identity gaps?
• Often in data we are forced to distill messy systems into indicators or metrics. BJ is pushing in the most positive way to get out of that sort of thinking. Create something new and create systems that can address things that we could never have anticipated.
• Easy to have data about kid and family and neighborhood, how do we get at the originating issues? How can we use the data point us to the root cause?

2. Thomson Family Discussion

Observations

• Madison picture as big as Jameson’s
• A lot about Jameson, not a lot about Madison.
• Individual outcomes as symptoms of system failure.
  • The fact that Ruth’s low-income housing is in a food desert is a failure of the low-income system.
• Not a lot of opportunity where they live.

Questions / What do we need to know?

• Why is Jameson interested in the education system? Does he have any reason to believe in education system? He has developed the fatalistic time perspective.
• Jameson does seem to have caring adults in his life, but it’s a matter of the capacity of those adults.
  • His grandmother could be very caring, but not able to provide that care.
  • What are the factors in education that may be able to help this? Many children have trauma, but with a caring adult in their life they can overcome that trauma.
  • Hard to quantify presence of a caring adult. That is something that the education system can provide, but there are certain kids that are not getting that caring adult despite the position of the institution and their ability to provide it. It comes down to bias.
• Is anybody able to help John? (those services exist). If John is a homeless vet there is a 60% chance he has a mental illness, combined with substance abuse. He is only eligible for those services if he had an honorable discharge.
• As much support needed for the adults as for the children. Does Ruth actually have support parenting?
• Need to know about the relationship between Ruth and Sarah.
• Is there extended family? Siblings/ Aunts? Is there a way to build a bigger community network for this family?
• Where is this occurring inner city? Rural area? How can we design a good solution for those settings?
• Was he moved to a new school district? Are those districts following the sending procedures, providing that information?
• Does the school district know that he had placement change or trauma? If child welfare is able to share that data with the school district and there are behavioral issues, they would know that they need to approach the student in a trauma informed way. Real time connection of one to one system.
• Children move faster than the data about them moves. That means they are often transient in the school system.
• Jameson is feeling the effects of structural racism. How many other black people are in his life. Are his teachers white?
  • Not addressing these problems
• What do Sarah, John and Ruth want custody of the children to look like moving forward? The path to having Madison and Jameson back with Sarah is potentially a different path then if Ruth will be caring for them. That will have different implication for how the system should be serving this family. Empowering this family means they deserve the agency to design the path that they want to take.
  • What supports can the system help provide to help them get them to that goal?
  • If Sarah getting the children back requires positive parenting, can the system provide training for positive parenting or opportunities for that? If it cannot, that could be remedied.
  • No one ever holds the system accountable for providing the space to grant agency to the family.
• Need to know from the system how much or where there are opportunities for the family to have agencygiven the constraints of the system.

Madison

• Seems like Madison is eligible for Head Start (maybe not income eligible?). That means that a lot of the nutrition and healthcare may be available. Also means that Ruth has somewhere safe for Madison to go. Ruth can spend more energy on Sarah and Jameson or work somewhere else. Benefits of the program for the child, but also for the parents.
• Nurse home visitor? State preschool program? Home visitation program? 

Other takeaways and observations 

• Students don’t fail school, schools fail students. Individualistic focus blinds people to system failure. The systems that should have been there to support them aren’t.
• One of the upstream determinants is the interoperability of the systems in the communities in which they are living.
• Parent non-profits also exacerbate inequities.
• School lunch program is the biggest segregator of public. Free lunch has implications.
• Data should be used for strategic planning purposes, not for punitive purposes.