Thank you to Springfield Public Schools for giving us this glimpse into their practice and success and to Doreen Kelly-Carney and Diane Scott for their great work as coaches.
It’s no secret that we are proponents of fit and match and preventing summer melt here at NCAN. For years, we have talked with members about these principles’ importance in postsecondary advising, and more recently we have looked at how K-12 districts
and schools can put them to use to benefit students as well. We even have whole toolkits about these topics (see fit and match and summer melt).
But talking about these things only shows what’s possible, it doesn’t always show other interested districts how to get there.
The Springfield Public Schools are located in western Massachusetts. The district enrolls about 26,000 students across 61 schools. About 80% of those students are economically disadvantaged; about two-thirds are Hispanic and nearly 20% are Black. Springfield
has a strong commitment to closing equity gaps in postsecondary outcomes, and over the past two years has been an enthusiastic participant in the To & Through Advising Challenge. The district has been making significant efforts to change practice to better serve students.
This past spring, Springfield Public Schools endeavored to improve its practices related to both fit and match and summer melt. This post, through Springfield’s lens, provides an example of how to roll out districtwide professional development on these
topics.
Yolanda Johnson, Springfield Public Schools’ executive officer for student services, Apelila Joseph, Springfield Promise program administrator, and Dr. Leticia Boyles, school counselor, worked with the district’s Advising Challenge coaches, Doreen Kelly-Carney
and Diane Scott, to provide new resources for counselors and other school personnel to use while advising students. In the spring, even with everything coronavirus-related sowing chaos, this team and counselors at three high schools participating
in the project were able to continue working together. Interestingly, COVID-19 forcing meetings to go virtual gave the coaches the opportunity to talk with teams from these high schools concurrently rather than conducting individual meetings.
The sessions described below were with representatives from all three of the high schools involved in the first year of the Advising Challenge. Each was preceded by a planning meeting and followed by a debriefing session with the district’s leadership
team. We describe them here at some length to give ideas to other districts about how to do the same; there is an emphasis on pacing and participants below because these components are also critical to the success of new initiatives.
Be sure to take note of the attachments in each section; these real-world artifacts may be adaptable for your own purposes or at a minimum serve as inspiration.
This session notably included the chief schools officer for high schools, an assistant superintendent, and the head of the Student Employment Office, which “ensures High School students develop transferable academic, technical and marketable skills necessary
to graduate College and Career ready.” The meeting served a number of purposes:
Introduce “behavioral nudging” research with a particular focus on hidden drivers of student behavior.
Discuss the potential of Signal Vine to automate and personalize support through text messaging.
Show sample summer melt texts and a live demo of the Signal Vine platform.
Hand over a “starter” spreadsheet for the leadership team to populate and submit to Signal Vine once acontract was signed.
Share texting “pro tips” (both from coaches and Signal Vine)
This session aimed to explore solutions and innovations that would increase the rate at which students in Springfield would apply to, choose, and show up at a match college.
At this meeting, the coaches introduced four solutions they thought held the greatest potential to change counseling practice in Springfield:
Implement a College Match Program like the one piloted successfully in Chicago and New York City.
Leverage technology to scale advising (given limited resources and high-stakes outcomes).
Become more event-driven (recognizing increased importance of early decision applications and the need to move deadlines earlier).
Explore a cohort model (e.g., POSSE-like) with select target colleges.
The coaches provided attendees with a searchable match list of postsecondary institutions. The coaches developed two versions, but the
one introduced here was a large, data-rich, interactive Google sheet that included nearly 100 colleges in Massachusetts (and nearby states). Counselors can look up schools that students might be interested in and quickly see if students should apply
to those colleges given their academic statistics. This list is filterable across multiple key attributes simultaneously.
The coaches then walked attendees through an exercise designed to demonstrate the power of this tool for advising students by creating a custom list based on multiple institutional characteristics.
Capitalizing on the buy-in from the previous session, the coaches showed attendees the powerful role that texting could play in fit and match advising. They stressed that texting could help scale the excellent work of school counselors and nudge students
to show up for events and in-person assistance more well prepared.
At this session, the coaches also encouraged them to build their own POSSEs and encouraged them to target colleges that can meet full need (or close to it), have high graduation rates, and are within a few hours’ drive.
Within a week of this session, the coaches got another signal that they had buy-in: they received a call that the district would like to move forward on the match list, the texting to improve fit and match, and developing a cohort model and target colleges.
Presented a list of 23 target colleges and explained why they were chosen. This was the second match list developed, and it’s the opposite of the large, filterable match version. The 23 schools on this list were selected based on both data and the
admissions and financial aid experiences of high schools in urban areas in Massachusetts. These were the colleges the coaches recommended as target schools for Springfield in a later session. The hope is that counselors will work extensively with
these schools and send students to them.
Discussed the possibility of working across Springfield high schools to identify and send groups (POSSEs) of students at risk of under-matching to these target schools.
Highlights from this meeting included:
The coaches were encouraged by the level of engagement they received from the live demonstration of the match list, and that resulting discussion elicited both questions and suggestions for improvement.
Importantly on the “starter” texts, coaches were able to show counselors that they would not be starting from scratch with fit and match texting – that a comprehensive set of texts had already been created that they could use or tailor.
The coaches also delivered on a promise to recommend fewer than 25 schools for Springfield students at risk of undermatching.
When a late-breaking development over the summer prompted a need for a rapid rollout of Signal Vine, the coaches got to work. The challenge was to take a texting program that ideally would have been implemented over the course of months and condense it
into a couple of weeks.
The coaches came up with this thorough flowchart (created on Lucidchart).
The flowchart showed their partners in Springfield how texting could capture the many changes students had made to their plans since they filled out the exit survey (or didn’t) and how they could then segment students and assist them accordingly.
Having these data was a critical step for the schools. Engaging with Signal Vine captured baseline data on both summer melt and text message engagement. Had the district not engaged Signal Vine this year, they would have had to wait another year to get
that baseline data and begin to measure progress on reducing summer melt.
And so, at warp speed, Springfield Public Schools, a very successful participant in the To & Through Advising Challenge, made significant progress on both adopting fit and match advising practices and combating summer melt over just one spring and
summer.
In a future blog post, we’ll catch up with Springfield to hear more about how the summer melt rollout went and to check in with how counselors are using the college match lists described above.
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