Deb Montgomery is a full time Check & Connect mentor at Denfeld High School in Duluth, Minnesota. Deb is in her second year of working with Check & Connect in conjunction with the Minnesota Department of Education. She works with 32 students on her caseload, and has been an amazing addition to the Denfeld staff! … Continue reading
I recently interviewed Emma Dixon, an education specialist (aka Check & Connect mentor) at Treehouse, a Seattle-based nonprofit serving 7,000 children in foster care statewide (see more about Treehouse’s implementation of Check & Connect). The organization has been implementing Check & Connect since 2013 to help foster youth graduate from high school at the same … Continue reading
This month for Mentor Corner we bring you an interview with another passionate and skillful Check & Connect mentor, Keima Davis. Ms. Davis has worked for Communities In Schools of Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina (CIS-Charlotte-Mecklenburg) on the Project L.I.F.T. (Leadership & Investment For Transformation) team. The Project L.I.F.T. team works in the Charlotte-Macklenburg Schools with a goal to change … Continue reading
We bring you the story of another passionate and impactful mentor who both coordinates their Check & Connect program and mentors students. Ann Jones works with the Youth Educational Support Services (YESS) program in Granite School in Salt Lake City, Utah as a Check & Connect (C&C) coordinator and mentor. C&C is part of a … Continue reading
This month’s Mentor’s Corner bring us to James Medina in Miami-Dade School District. Mr. Medina is an EBD program clinician or school counselor, and began working with Check & Connect last school year as part of the Florida’s statewide C&C implementation (link) where existing staff serve as mentors. In addition to his counseling caseload, Mr. … Continue reading
I am very excited to present our third Mentor’s Corner interview with Maggie Lorenz. I met Maggie in 2015 when St. Paul Public Schools (SPPS) began implementing Check & Connect at a district level. Now in her second year as a full-time Check & Connect coordinator and mentor within the Indian Education program in SPPS, … Continue reading
I am very happy to announce a new addition to our blog posts, the Mentor Corner. So much good work is happening with Check & Connect mentors and their mentees around the country and the world, so we wanted to share a bit of that good work with you! With the Mentor Corner, I will … Continue reading
In our last Attend-Engage-Invest Blog, we encouraged you to work with school administrators to consider Alternatives to Suspension. We recently found scientific evidence from the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) that you can share with key decision-makers to impress upon them the importance of finding alternatives. We know that students who are removed from the classroom for … Continue reading
Research tells us that students who miss 10% or more of school days are at a higher risk for disengagement and dropping out before completion of high school (see Early Warning Systems in Education: Resources & Tools). And logic tells us that if students are not in class receiving instruction, they are not as likely to … Continue reading
With each Check & Connect training we conduct, we feel (and often hear) the same frustration when it comes to parental involvement in school. What is interesting, is that after we discuss Check & Connect’s belief in family engagement versus parental involvement, I hear new and creative ways that school staff are reaching out and engaging families, … Continue reading
Attend, Engage, Invest 