Cooperation and Accountability: Spotlight on the Jefferson County Afterschool System

A Forum — November 3, 2006

This forum explored how and why computer-assisted information sharing has increased positive outcomes for urban and suburban youth who participate frequently in afterschool programs in and around Louisville, Kentucky. Panelists described the KidTrax data sharing partnership between the Jefferson County Public Schools and 65 school-, community-, and faith-based afterschool providers that helps them (1) coordinate their work in areas where their missions overlap, (2) improve internal evaluations of their own programs, and (3) demonstrate accountability by documenting quality for parents, board members, funders, and other supporters.

Martin Bell, Deputy to the Superintendent of Jefferson County Public Schools (JCPS), noted that JCPS, formed in 1975 by a merger of the Louisville City and Jefferson County school systems, is the largest school district in Kentucky and the 26th largest in the United States. The 150 schools and more than 13,000 full-time employees in JCPS serve 97,600 students. Of the students, about 58% are white, 35% are African American, and 8% are other races. Census surveys indicate that roughly one-fifth live in poverty. JCPS is proud to have never expelled a student in the last 25 years.

Bell said the community has long stressed collaboration between its schools, government and private agencies, businesses, and organizations. JCPS has more than 2,800 partnerships with businesses and participates in Neighborhood Place, a set of one-stop family centers for Jefferson County residents accessing social and educational services. Dozens of for-profit, nonprofit, and local governmental partners have recruited more than 5,000 volunteer tutors and raised more than $6 million for the Every 1 Reads initiative, which includes in-school and out-of-school programs designed to ensure that all students in the Louisville area are reading at grade level by 2008.

JCPS operates a data warehouse, which stores individualized student records that include indicators such as attendance, tardiness, suspensions, grades in classes, and scores on state and district assessments. Principals and educators collect and send data from their schools into the warehouse and can access that data online for purposes such as identifying the needs of a particular student or spotlighting school-wide problem areas that could require changes in administration or policy.

The KidTrax partnership allows afterschool and other out-of-school time youth providers to gain the same kind of access as principals to data within the JCPS data warehouse. In return, JCPS gets access to data collected by its partners on such indicators as the frequency and lengths of visits by its students to various afterschool sites and activities. This can be done because all data put in by the schools and its partners is linked to students’ unique identifying numbers, which are assigned by JCPS.

“The partners can use the data we have in the school system to enhance their programs, [and] to help kids deal with issues they’re having in schools,” Bell said. “The schools can assess the impact of a community-based program on identified student indicators.”

Bell explained how the KidTrax partnership works: Each student has an identification card, bar-coded to link with his or her identifying number, and uses it at a KidTrax kiosk when entering an afterschool program. The partner organization uploads that information to the data warehouse and can use the district’s online data-mining tool to analyze selected parts of the school system’s data.

Robert Rodosky, Executive Director of the Accountability, Research, and Planning Department for JCPS, said the district requires an elaborate system of confidentiality safeguards, including agreements between the school, the partners, and the parent(s) of each child who is tracked. Parents may opt out of the tracking system for their child. A big challenge was creating an interoperability system that would allow data to move between the school system’s data warehouse and the KidTrax kiosks. This was done in less than a year by a team from the schools, students at the University of Louisville, and representatives of nFocus Software, the firm that designed and operates the KidTrax membership management system. It also requires periodic training of afterschool personnel on how to use the combined system.

Data is analyzed online using CASCADE, a data drilling tool developed in-house by the JCPS staff. Rodosky showed examples of an individual afterschool program’s report, revealing trends among student participants in math and reading scores, suspensions, tardy arrivals, and days absent. Reports can be created for individual schools or students.

Overall, the results are encouraging, according to his comparison of outcomes for students who visited afterschool programs eight or more times in the 2005-06 school year versus those who visited only one to four times. Those with the higher participation rates at afterschool programs had significantly fewer absences from school and greater improvements in reading scores.

Rodosky contrasted those optimistic outcomes with the mixed results of his similar study of outcomes for students who were tutored through Supplemental Educational Services (SES) offered under the No Child Left Behind Act. These tutored students were compared to similar students who signed up but never showed up for SES tutoring during the 2005-06 school year. Both groups had similar reading and math scores at the start of the year. His analysis showed that the tutoring had somewhat helped increase math scores, but not reading scores.

Darrell Aniton, Division Director of the Louisville Metro Office of Youth Development, said his department, along with other local afterschool funders including Metro United Way and foundations, used their training and collaboration programs, as well as their control of funds, to encourage and even mandate afterschool programs to join the KidTrax partnership. As a consequence, the partnership has since grown from eight partners operating 14 afterschool sites in 2002 to 65 partners operating 89 sites in 2006. Aniton said KidTrax outcomes data affect decisions on how much money to give to which programs “because there’s never enough funding to go around, so it’s important to know that the money is really going toward the organizations that are making a difference in the lives of young people.” Organizations pay to install KidTrax, but funders often cover that cost with mini-grants.

Don Shaw, Executive Director of the Salvation Army Boys & Girls Clubs of Louisville, said KidTrax allows his staff to track both programmatic and youth-related information at their nine sites effectively, and to make decisions based on that information. “We have spotted programs that didn’t work,” he said, and have then moved to change them or pull their funding. For example, staff spotted a site where school attendance was dropping, so they changed the program to counter the issue.

In terms of using youth information, Shaw says, “we can look at an individual’s school record and if he’s suspended, our staff can have a conversation with him about it.” And if a student shows up at the Boys & Girls Club without having attended school that day, the student is either denied entrance or placed into an academic activity before being allowed to participate in recreational club activities.

Shaw said that before KidTrax, his clubs depended on paper reports that often sat unread, spreadsheets that took time to prepare, and self reports that were subject to human error. Parents often didn’t provide useful data on family income, legal guardianship, or the size of a household. Getting report cards from students or tips on a child’s specific academic needs from teachers was often haphazard. And it was difficult to obtain multi-year data in order to find out if a child’s risk behaviors – like poor school attendance or academic performance – were improving or worsening.

As the first afterschool providers in Louisville to use KidTrax, Shaw’s clubs have compiled evidence that their programs increase school attendance, reduce out-of-school suspensions, improve test scores, decrease tardiness, and increase family participation, he said.

Policy Implications

Martin Bell said federal policymakers could draw four lessons from Louisville’s experience:

• Better connect the accountability standards of NCLB’s Supplemental Educational Services to districts’ own standards, which in many cases, are much more rigorous.
• Require accountability measures for any federal grant earmarked for a specific youth program.
• Tie accountability measures for 21st Century Community Learning Center grants to the standards set under the No Child Left Behind Act.
• Support the Schools Interoperability Framework Association, formed by education professionals, developers, and vendors to define the rules that would make it possible for all education software programs to work with each other efficiently, accurately and automatically.

Resources

• Jefferson County (Louisville) Kentucky, Chapter 2, Whatever It Takes: How 12 Communities Are Reconnecting Out-of-School Youth
• PowerPoint Presentation from November 3, 2006

Presenter Bios

Darrell Aniton is the Division Director of the Louisville Metro Department of Youth Development, whose mission is to create and promote programs and activities that focus on improving key developmental outcomes for young people. Mr. Aniton currently oversees programs in 34 sites throughout the community. He began his career at the Boys & Girls Clubs and now has more than 25 years of experience in the youth service field. In his current position, Mr. Aniton raises community awareness of youth issues, creates new youth programs, and assists community-based organizations to increase their capacity to meet the challenging needs of young people. Through his leadership, the city of Louisville was recognized by America’s Promise as one of the 100 Best Communities for Young People. Mr. Aniton serves on several local boards and advisory committees and has received numerous awards for his work with young people.

Marty Bell is the Deputy to the Superintendent for the Division of Community Development and Governmental Relations for the Jefferson County Public Schools. His responsibilities include overseeing the following departments within the Division: Adult and Continuing Education; Communications and Publications; Community and Governmental Relations; JCPS/YMCA Childcare Enrichment Program; Community Schools; Family Resource/Youth Services Centers; Louisville Education and Employment Partnership; Materials Production; Neighborhood Places; Public Information; Resource Development; School District/Business Partnerships; and School-to-Career. Before accepting his position with JCPS, he was an executive with Humana Hospitals, Inc. Mr. Bell is active with almost 20 community foundations and boards that focus on education, including the Leadership Louisville Board of Directors, the Louisville Public Library Foundation, Neighborhood Place, Junior Achievement, the Coalition for the Homeless, Inc., and the Louisville Metro Alliance for Youth.

Robert Rodosky is the Executive Director of the Accountability, Research & Planning Department for the Jefferson County Public Schools. The department’s vision is to provide reliable, valid, and useful information to decision makers in a timely manner. Prior to joining the school district, Dr. Rodosky was an evaluator for the Columbus (Ohio) Public Schools, the Assistant Director of the Evaluation Center at Western Michigan University, and an adjunct professor at both Western Michigan University and the University of Louisville. Dr. Rodosky earned his Ph.D. at the Ohio State University in the area of Curriculum Foundation and Research.

Don Shaw is the Executive Director/Chief Professional Officer of the Salvation Army Boys & Girls Clubs of Louisville. The Clubs are the largest nonprofit youth development program in Jefferson County, serving almost 10,000 children last year. Dr. Shaw has been in this position for over 15 years, during which he has been demonstrating the value that community based organizations can be to schools, law enforcement, and the community as a whole. Prior to this position, Mr. Shaw spent 12 years as an educator, teaching primarily in urban elementary and middle schools. This experience contributed greatly to his passion to improve the lives of inner city children and build working relationships with the schools. Mr. Shaw also previously served as the Development Coordinator for C.O.P.E.S. (Council on Prevention and Education: Substances). He has been recognized as the Salvation Army Professional of the Year and been given the Louisville Distinguished Service Award for Youth Development. Mr. Shaw has a bachelor’s degree in Elementary Education from the University of Louisville, as well as master’s degrees in both Marketing and Human Resource Development from Webster University.