Photo from City Year.

City Year, a program that deploys young adults to work in high-poverty DCPS schools, helps keep attendance up and boosts learning. But it’s not clear yet that it’s achieving its goal of preventing dropouts.

A national organization that has been around for 25 years, City Year’s overall aim is to reduce the number of students who drop out of high school, a figure that stands at about 25% nationwide and over 40% in DCPS. Its method is to send a small army of energetic, red-jacketed Americorps volunteers into schools at the highest risk of producing dropouts. Once there, the volunteers keep students behaving and on-task in class, run afterschool programs, and make phone calls to families whose kids haven’t shown up.

Generally the program produces good results. Last year, according to the organization, 12 of the 16 schools that hosted the program showed gains on DC’s standardized tests. Eighty-nine percent of the elementary school students who got literacy tutoring from City Year corps members improved their performance on a commonly used reading assessment. Among 6th- to 9th-graders who got the tutoring, 48% moved up from a failing grade to a passing grade over the course of the year.

Obviously, City Year doesn’t just focus on high schools in addressing the dropout crisis; of the 13 DCPS schools the program is in this year, only one, Cardozo Education Campus, includes a high school. Instead, the program looks for “early warning indicators” that can identify students at risk of dropping out as early as 6th grade. (Montgomery County has launched a program to identify such kids as early as 1st grade.)

In fact, City Year spokesman Jerry Wohletz says research shows that the program’s impact is greatest before students reach 10th grade. It focuses on earlier years and partners with other programs that follow students beyond that point.

Focus on risk factors

City Year’s approach targets three “ABC” risk factors: Attendance, Behavior, and Course performance in Math and English. Each corps member gets a “focus list” of at-risk students, identified in collaboration with teachers, and basically follows those kids around during the school day and sometimes through afterschool.

Generally, each participating school gets a team of 8 to 12 corps members. In addition to focusing on specific students, they also engage in activities designed to foster a positive school climate. That might range from enthusiastically greeting students as they arrive in the morning to organizing a Las Vegas-themed math night, as corps members did last year at Kelly Miller Middle School.

One strength of the program is that corps members are what City Year calls “near peers.” Ranging in age from 17 to 24, they’re generally younger than teachers but not that much older than students. The program says that leads to strong bonds between volunteers and the kids they work with, which can have a powerful effect on students’ behavior and performance.

On the other hand, most corps members will be gone after the end of their one-year stint, possibly leaving a student feeling bereft. But Andrew Stein, development director of City Year in DC, says that because corps members all wear the same bright uniform, kids have a positive identification with corps members in general, not just the specific ones they worked with the year before.

He also says that many corps members continue to stay in touch with students after they leave a school. Stein, himself a former corps member, is still mentoring two kids he met when they were 6 and 9; they’re now in high school. He says the organization is trying to find ways to make it easier for its alumni to keep in touch with students.

The working conditions for corps members sound grueling: they generally arrive at school by 7:30 and often don’t leave until 6 pm. And salaries are minimal. But Stein says that last year the DC program lost only 4% of its volunteers.

It’s obviously less expensive to have an Americorps volunteer in the classroom than a full-fledged teacher, but the program does have a cost. Each school pays $100,000 to participate, with the money coming either from DCPS’s central office or out of the principal’s discretionary funds. That fee covers about 20% of the organization’s budget. About a quarter of the budget comes from Americorps, with private contributions making up the remainder.

Given that the school only pays a fraction of the cost, the program is a good deal. Still, a few schools have opted out, choosing to spend the money elsewhere. And some schools lose money for City Year as a result of their own success: if they improve sufficiently, federal funding that’s targeted at low-performing schools may disappear.

High school feeder patterns

When City Year signed its first contract with DCPS in 2009, its plan was to focus on the feeder patterns to the 5 high schools that produced over 50% of DCPS’s dropouts. The idea was that a student could have a continuous relationship with City Year throughout her school career.

One of those 5 schools, Spingarn, is now closed. City Year is now in elementary and middle schools within the feeder patterns of 4 high schools—Cardozo, Anacostia, Ballou, and HD Woodson.

But Stein says there have been some “detours” from the original plan, either because a particular school approaches the organization or because DCPS wants to focus on a low-performing school outside one of the feeder patterns.

The number of schools City Year serves decreased this partly because 5 of the schools it was in last year—4 DCPS and one charter—were closed. The program has continued to serve some of those students in the schools where they were reassigned.

Ultimately, City Year would like to reach half the DCPS students who are at risk of dropping out, following them from elementary through high school. It’s just signed a contract with DCPS that could lead to as many as 5 schools being added in each of the next four years.

If that kind of growth happens, and if the growth stays within feeder patterns, it would make it possible for students to maintain a relationship with corps members for multiple years. But the big unanswered question, so far, is whether the program actually succeeds in preventing students from dropping out.

The answer may come within the next few years: the organization says it’s now working with DCPS on getting access to data that would allow it to track students over time, even if they change schools within the DCPS system. That won’t help if a student switches to a charter school or leaves the area before graduation, but it’s certainly better than nothing.