Education nonprofit City Forward Collective announced a $750,000 grant fund to support local schools’ efforts against COVID-19. The organization is looking to help Milwaukee’s schools when summer comes to an end and schools have to face the challenge of reopening. Eligible schools have until Wednesday, June 10, to apply for a grant of up to $30,000.
“In March, we saw chaos around school closures because nobody really knew who was in charge of making decisions about how the schools should proceed across the city,” says City Forward Collective’s executive director Dr. Patricia Hoben. “Some of Milwaukee’s students lost a third of their school year this spring. If we don’t respond urgently, the children already furthest behind will lose even more ground.”
Schools who receive a grant from City Forward Collective will have to develop reopening plans to ensure that learning is not impacted even if a second wave of coronavirus forces buildings to remain closed. The nonprofit will not only provide funding, but also training and supervision, and the plans and resources thus developed will be shared publicly.
“What I think people don't realize about Milwaukee is how complicated our education ecosystem is. Only 56% of publicly funded students are in Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS). Another 15-16% are in public charter schools, and then another 28% are in private schools that receive publicly funded vouchers. What happened when schools closed is that each of those different schools made their own decisions independently,” Hoben explains.
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The objective that her organization pursues is to unite these schools and share resources and experience to allow for a coordinated response. “If somebody developed a strategy this spring to get 90% of their students to participate in remote learning, while another school was only able to get 40%, then what is it that the school with 90% participation is doing right? How do we scale that to other schools? Is that a resource, some kind of software we have to buy? We want to provide funding so that we can identify and scale the things that worked.”
“We are working to bring the collective wisdom of the people to the table,” she adds. “Schools started to experiment with what's working and what's not. Some of them used their own curriculum to guide what the teachers were doing; others used available online resources and then had their teachers try to figure out what to do with that. With our support, schools will have the opportunity to spend weeks over the summer looking at what happened in the spring, what worked and what didn't work, how to expand on the things that did work and how to leverage resources from other schools that had more success in how they were able to engage more students. We're also providing technical assistance and trainings throughout the summer with school leaders across the city, and we help share what worked so that we can come together as a community rather than every man and woman by themselves.”
Supporting Low-income Students
To be eligible, schools need to “mainly serve students from low-income households in the city of Milwaukee,” City Forward Collective announced. Priority will be given to schools that were hit hardest by the pandemic.
Milwaukee’s public school system mostly serves underprivileged students—in 2019, 83%of students enrolled in MPS were from low-income households. With less funding comes more difficulty to face the specific needs imposed by quarantine, meaning that students from low-income household are hit even harder than their wealthier peers, which is why helping them is a priority.
“One major issue [for students from low-income families] is lack of access to broadband internet,” Hoben explains. As schools transitioned to remote classes, it came out that up to 30% of MPS students don’t have access to the internet. “Since remote learning requires access to a computer and internet, that creates an inequity with suburban students who most often have computers at home. Another thing is that many of their parents have to work; they are the families that have the lowest wages but also the ones that have to be at work during this crisis. We've heard from our high school students that they have to take care of the little ones all day, or they're working themselves because their parents lost their jobs.”
The grant money should be spent on “whatever schools need in order to be ready to have a healthy launch of the school year,” Hoben states. That includes buying Chromebooks—which are cheap laptops—purchasing hotspots to allow students to access internet at home or even buying personal protective equipment like masks and hand sanitizer.
But beyond what money can buy, schools will have to face organizational problems that only cooperation can help with. How will schools organize classrooms with social distancing? What about cafeterias? Teachers will have to be educated on how to teach remotely and how to engage students outside of the usual classroom setting. Schools will have to deal with the emotional trauma of students who saw acquaintances and relatives getting sick from COVID-19. Schools cannot improvise responses to all these new issues at the last minute; the summer must be put to good use to prepare our educators for the upcoming year.
“In March and April, we were just reacting to the crisis,” Hoben says. “Now, some schools have been recovering, and they are actually teaching what they intended to teach in a regular year instead of review packets; they are in a recovery phase. The crisis will have a long-term impact on education; that's what I would call the reinvention phase. We need to take some of the good things that came out of this crisis and translate them into long-term strategies for delivering education even under normal circumstances. That’s what we will be looking for.”
To apply for a grant, visit cityforwardcollective.org.
