Funded data system Wallace Foundation
Funded data system Our Community's Children: Grand Rapids Community Schools Program
Start Date 2012-00-00
Notes Measuring Effectiveness Grand Rapids’ efforts received a significant boost in 2012, thanks to a $765,000 grant from the Wallace Foundation. The grant has funded the development a Youth Community Data Center, in conjunction with Grand Valley State University, that for the first time will enable the city to connect afterschool programs with daily school attendance and assess the effectiveness of after- school programs. “We will be able to measure what combination of services is producing the best outcomes, down to the individual level,” Heemstra says. “The data center will also show combined impact and show providers how they rate” among all ELO Network members. As of early 2015, Our Community’s Children had piloted the measurement work at two school sites and was scaling up the data center for the entire ELO network. The new data center, officials believe, will yield significant improvement over the current system of measurement, which involves an annual report by a local evaluator. The evaluations compare the performance of students in each afterschool program with others from the same school who are not in the program. Based on these evaluations, student participants in previous years experienced “noticeable” improvement, according to Lopez. Following the 2013-14 school year—the first in which the school-based afterschool programs were tied to each school’s improvement plan—the evaluation mea- sured “dramatic improvement” in academic performance, behavior and attendance. For Heartwell and other leaders in Grand Rapids, school-related outcomes aren’t the only important measures of success for ELO. “We’ve seen the impact it can make on juvenile delinquency,” he says—a factor that could be significant for building support for more and better learning initiatives in other cities. “We’ve been able to track data around juvenile arrests and interactions with the police. The afterschool program is having an enormous impact.”
Updated over 4 years ago

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