By Bill DeBaun, Director of Data and Evaluation, NCAN, and Rebecca Kruge - RISE Network Facilitator, College & Career Readiness
The Connecticut RISE Network (RISE) takes a collaborative approach to improving student outcomes and closing opportunity gaps. Through a nine-school and eight-district network, RISE connects teachers, school counselors,
and administrators to amplify their collective impact by working toward common goals.
RISE caught NCAN’s eye last fall when the network published a blog post about its summer melt prevention efforts that served more than 1,800 students across seven high schools in six school districts.
The summer melt prevention campaign started as a pilot in summer 2017 with two RISE high schools. Since then, the program has expanded considerably, and this summer, it will be adopted throughout RISE’s entire network. True to its strategy of scaling
promising practices, Salman Khan, an Applied Data Strategist with RISE, said starting with two schools was an important proof of concept that the program could be implemented successfully network-wide.
“We first started summer melt texting because RISE educators were seeing that far more seniors said they planned to go to college than actually enrolled, and we were troubled by the gap,” Khan said in a 2020 blog post. “When students graduate from high
school, they lose key support, yet still have to complete over seven different steps between graduation in the spring and enrollment in the fall, including attending orientation, submitting immunization records, providing housing forms, registering
for courses, and more. The enrollment process post-graduation can be daunting and confusing. We wanted to offer graduates continued support, and we’ve been overwhelmed by the response from students.”
Here’s how the program works: All participating students receive personalized text messages to help them stay on track toward their postsecondary goals. Signal Vine has been an important part of this campaign
for high schools. It serves as a force multiplier for summer melt coordinators who can click one button to coordinate outreach to a full caseload of students.
Being able to do outreach at this scale has drastically increased the schools’ ability to engage with students and effectively support them through their post-graduation postsecondary transitions.
To promote success throughout the network, RISE makes a sample schedule of text messages publicly available with Google Drive. These text suggestions act as a starting point for what communications schools send out via Signal Vine. From there, personalization
is key. After the initial texts are sent, the summer melt coordinator can interact one-on-one with students through the text message platform. Significant personalization and one-on-one interactions increase student engagement.
Last summer, educators sent more than 50,000 texts to students to support their summer transitions – these messages reached 80% of all grade 12 students at participating RISE high schools. While engagement varied, and not all texts required a response,
summer melt coordinators received nearly 10,000 responses from students.
Thinking of implementing these practices? Here’s how RISE pulled it off.
The summer melt coordinators who make this work possible committed to doing this work outside of the academic year’s obligations. Some participating high schools used built-in funding for summer counseling hours to fund summer melt coordinators working
on the summer melt initiative. Other schools offered a summer hourly rate for their time.
Khan said the overwhelming response from students was surprising at first. To adjust and meet the demand, RISE initiated recurring cross-school counselor meetings to adequately prepare counselors to design and implement a summer melt campaign and support
students' questions and needs. For example, counselors received questions about the Pledge to Advance Connecticut (PACT) program, the state’s last-dollar free community college program. The PACT program offered immense opportunities to students from
school districts throughout the state, and that meant participating summer melt coordinators needed to be prepared to field questions from students about how to navigate the system and receive the benefit.
The questions and needs students exhibited over the summer prompted the creation of postsecondary checklists that outline all of the steps students need to complete before the summer ends.
Beyond summer preparations, the summer melt prevention program is also changing the context of college and career readiness overall in the participating high schools.
“It pushed us as an organization to think about professional development for counselors and college and career coordinators, and targeted transition support for students,” Khan said. It has also informed the further development of college and career summer
academies for between grades 11 and 12, so that rising seniors get a head start on their postsecondary plans and have a clear sense of upcoming milestones.
This summer, all nine schools in the RISE Network are adopting the program, and in parallel, the Connecticut State Department of Education is offering 26 high schools access to the same texting software to engage students around Free Application for Federal
Student Aid (FAFSA) completion. The success of this program is just one example of impactful student engagement practices schools can use. As schools look to transition from remote and hybrid learning back to in-person instruction, lessons learned
from this program can inform practice throughout the school year.
“We can now use this as a learning tool to make sure all students have what they need before and after they graduate from high school,” Khan said. “Our hope is that every text offers students a little more support and encouragement to achieve their goals
and offers educators a little more data to inform best practices.”
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