With Chicago Public Schools (CPS) students back in the classroom five days a week this fall, schools across the city are once again abuzz after a year of mostly remote learning. While the pandemic continues to impact school communities and our education system as a whole, the return of CPS students to classrooms is a significant step forward, and Civic Consulting Alliance supported CPS in critical student re-engagement efforts leading up to the start of the new school year.

In the 2020-2021 school year, the COVID-19 crisis sparked a significant increase in student truancy and chronic absence in Chicago and in cities across the country. This increase was particularly pronounced among Black and Latinx students, exacerbating the inequitable impact of COVID-19 on Chicago’s communities.

As CPS neared the 2021 summer break, it sought to identify, contact, and re-engage students urgently and at a massive scale. At the same time, the district was undergoing a leadership transition, which reduced its organizational capacity. CPS rapidly launched a centralized re-engagement effort, but it needed to step back and develop a cohesive approach to ensure that it reached all students in need.

Given our deep knowledge of CPS, expertise operationalizing large-scale plans, and project management skills, CPS engaged Civic Consulting Alliance in May 2021 to support the development of its re-engagement framework. We worked to:

• Develop a district-wide framework outlining CPS’ student re-engagement approach;
• Map current re-engagement activities against this framework to identify gaps and opportunities to leverage community-based organizations in outreach;
• Create an implementation plan to guide re-engagement efforts going forward; and
• Provide hands-on problem solving and project management support for the implementation of re-engagement efforts, in particular, CPS’ first-ever home visit operation.

As a result of this process, CPS took a new approach to re-engaging students over summer 2021, including:

• Use of a Student Prioritization Index to identify students in need of more individualized support, especially those students in need of a 1:1 intervention such as a home visit;
• Home visits on a massive scale—hiring about 500 Outreach Ambassadors via community-based organizations to reach thousands of students by the end of the summer;
• Building out standardized tools for Outreach Ambassadors and administrators, including scripts for outreach and defined re-engagement processes; and
• Organizing youth programming, parent phone banking, and canvassing, to engage students and their families.

Equipped with a re-engagement framework and implementation tools, CPS reached 85,459 students across its re-engagement efforts, and 91.2% of CPS students attended school on the first day of the 2021-2022 school year. Moreover, as a result of this effort, CPS is even better equipped to reach and support disengaged students and their families in the future.

Education is key to young people’s health, wellbeing, and long-term success. As the first step to address unfinished learning, CPS’ re-engagement efforts are critical to Chicago’s long-term, equitable recovery from the effects of COVID-19, and to the district’s continuous efforts to ensure greater student success.

“Thanks in part to the support of Civic Consulting Alliance, CPS continues to strengthen its foundation to effectively reach talented, disengaged students this school year and beyond—paving the way for sustained, districtwide change and greater student success.”
— Maurice Swinney, Interim Chief Education Officer, Chicago Public Schools