Company Profile
City Connects
Company Overview
In high-poverty urban school districts across America, many children face challenges outside of school that present persistent and severe barriers to their academic success.
For these students, we created City Connects—an innovative and proven school-based intervention that revitalizes student support in elementary schools. City Connects collaborates with teachers to identify the strengths and needs of every child and then links each student to a uniquely tailored set of intervention, prevention, and enrichment services located in the community.
Rooted in evidence-based practice, City Connects serves as a hub for student support activities in schools. By leveraging the community's resources and working within the existing framework of schools, City Connects is a cost-effective intervention that efficiently addresses a child's academic, social-emotional, family, and physical well-being.
Our data show that this systematic and scalable approach to meeting the needs of urban students helps children thrive in school, improves academic performance, and significantly narrows the achievement gap.
Company History
The partnership that led to City Connects began in the early 1990s. Researchers and leaders at Boston College, a Boston Public elementary school, and community agencies began to explore ways to address out-of-school factors that impact students’ success and thriving in school.
The Boston College and Boston Public Schools partners engaged the school and community in a two-year planning effort from 1999 to 2001. The partners drew on best practices emerging at the time from research on student support. In an iterative process, they repeatedly convened school principals, teachers, other school and district staff, representatives of community agencies, and families to develop a system that re-organized the work schools have traditionally done in the area of student support (e.g., the work carried out by school counselors, nurses, psychologists, and community partners). The resulting system met the criteria of best practices and was initially implemented in Boston schools in 2001.
This implementation, which is now City Connects, proved scalable. City Connects expanded from six Boston Public Schools to six more in a new area of the city in 2007. Three years later, the success of the program led the school district to invite City Connects to expand to six “Turnaround” schools — that is, schools officially designated by No Child Left Behind (NCLB) standards as in the category of “Restructuring.” City Connects has since expanded to public schools in Springfield, Holyoke and Brockton, MA; New York City (in partnership with Children’s Aid Society); Hartford, CT; and Dayton, Ohio. It is now being implemented in over 70 public, charter, and Catholic schools in four states.