With a $2.4 million, three-year grant, Communities In Schools of the Permian Basin has expanded into two more elementary schools and added two new high school campus coordinators.
Nationally in coordination with the Ballmer Group, Communities In Schools announced in August that they would be committing up to $165 million to help the organization scale its integrated student support model to 1,000 new majority low income, or Title I-eligible schools.
CIS wants to grow into every Title I-eligible school in America and to build a stronger system that better supports the 12 million students living in poverty across the United States, a news release said. This new initiative will establish a fund designed to accelerate the adoption of its in-school student support services model to under-resourced schools across the county.
The new campuses in Ector County ISD are Burleson Elementary and Downing Elementary in ECISD have been added, as well as two additional high school positions. This is in addition to the 14 current positions serving 13 campuses in ECISD. The addition of these campuses and positions allows CISPB to increase case-management services for an additional 800 students in the Permian Basin.
CISPB will be able to case-manage close to 3,000 students in total as well as impacting several thousand more students on campus, families and community members.
“It’s a great opportunity for us,” Communities In Schools Permian Basin Executive Director Eliseo Elizondo said.
The Ballmer Group, headed by Steve Ballmer and his wife, Connie Snyder, had been working with national CIS over the last few years, and making some contributions. Ballmer is the former chief executive officer of Microsoft and owner of the Los Angeles Clippers basketball team.
Elizondo said there are three cohorts for the funds.
“Over the next three years, each grant is a three-year commitment. Then there are going to be three cohorts. We’re part of cohort one,” he said.
Cohorts 2 and 3 will be coming up in 2024 and 2025 and Communities In Schools can apply for more funds for those years.
“I jumped on it … I wanted to make sure I took advantage of this huge opportunity for us for expansion and for the schools and our funders. This first round, especially, it means a great deal to our schools to be able to take advantage of this matching grant,” Elizondo said.
The districts had to make a commitment, so he went to Ector County and Midland ISD first because he didn’t have time to ask other districts. It is a three-year commitment, which is sometime difficult to get with districts and nonprofits.
“I thought it was a great opportunity that could not be missed,” Elizondo said.
“For cohort 1, I applied with Midland ISD and Ector County ISD and we negotiated and discussed objectives and we came up with a plan for each and what we would submit with. Once we got all that nailed down, we submitted a proposal and got the full amount that I asked for which was $2.4 million over three years, which is 1.2 million from the Ballmer Group, and then $1.2 million commitment from the local school districts,” he added.
This puts Communities In Schools in two more ECISD elementary schools. The nonprofit had been piloted at Dowling Elementary School. All together, four more positions are being added — two for the elementary schools and two coordinators for Odessa and Permian high schools. With roughly 4,000 students each, Elizondo noted that they are like small cities.
The two positions at the high schools were requested by the school district.
Elizondo said ECISD wanted the new coordinator positions to help with attendance and chronic absenteeism.
He added that the school district’s commitment to the program is a huge vote of confidence.
“I don’t take that lightly at all. We have to perform well. We have to help the school districts meet their needs and their end goals. That’s on us now — the spotlight and the pressure … and that’s good. … That’s what we’re here to do,” Elizondo said.
He added that chronic absences have always been an issue, even before COVID. Attendance impacts state funding.
Along with the pilot campus, Dowling and new ones Burleson and Downing, other elementary campuses with Communities In Schools are Buddy West, Murray Fly, Goalid and Cavazos elementary schools.
Elizondo said he thinks the district would have liked to add more schools, but they were limited because of budget issues this past spring.
Several schools want CIS on campus and they will do what they can to get there.
“I’ll be honest, I completely underestimated the draw that we would have at the elementaries. Now we’re piloting … in Midland our first two elementaries over there. I’ll say this about the grant, for us specifically, it’s allowing us to fill some major gaps that we had in our implementation across the Permian Basin. It was like more elementaries at ECISD is one of them and the high school coverage. For Midland, it’s the fact that we’re now covering the entire secondary level … and we’re piloting” at the elementary campuses, Elizondo said.
He added that he is eligible to continue to apply for the second and third cohorts.
“My board and I intend to do that,” Elizondo said.
Besides going deeper into ECISD and MISD, this gives him time to contact outlying districts.
”I’m going to see if I can get get some of them involved,” he added.
Being used to the secondary level, Elizondo realized there were even fewer resources at the elementary level.
“So there’s more of a need when an organization like ours steps in and starts providing support. It’s everything from the basic needs to the social emotional learning to the crisis and trauma. Because we have our own mental health team, I completely underestimated the draw that it would have on our mental health team, our counselors, from the elementaries. It’s just been immense. We opened up the floodgates … They keep my mental health team hopping,” Elizondo said.
Along with district personnel, mental health counselors from CIS recently went to Milam Elementary after the death teacher Kara Story, who was 35. Their therapy dog, Winnie, also went.
“We didn’t set up the mental health team to be a crisis response team, but we’re doing that a lot. Milam is not one of the schools that we serve. We just did that as a service to the district … because we can,” Elizondo said.
“It wasn’t necessarily what our objective when we set up the mental health team, but like I said, we were doing that and we do that for the districts at this point, even for campuses that we don’t serve. … We’re there and we have a team of licensed mental health professionals and so why wouldn’t we even if it’s a campus we don’t “serve?”
Communities In Schools of the Permian Basin is in Ector (ECISD), Midland (MISD), Howard (Big Spring ISD) and Reeves (Pecos-Barstow-Toyah ISD) counties.
He would like to expand into some other outlying districts.
“There’s plenty of schools out there that need our help. … I may approach them this fall and see if they want to participate next spring in the application,” Elizondo said.
