Letter to the Hon. John King, Acting Secretary of Education - U.S. Department of Education Should Use Providence's After-School Success as National Model

Letter

Dear Acting Secretary King:

Thank you for your recent appearances before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee and the House Education and Workforce Committee. As you saw there is keen interest in the implementation of the Every Student Succeeds Act. We write urging your continued collaboration with Congress on implementation, and specifically to call your attention to particular provisions we authored, which remain priorities for us going forward.

During the reauthorization of ESEA we worked with a Rhode Island community group that acts as a local intermediary in support of after school programming, Providence After School Alliance (PASA)--a city-wide, public-private partnership with the Mayor and Superintendent leveraging resources and community partnerships to improve schools and student learning. Using PASA's example, we authored the provisions in Title I requiring that intermediary organizations be included in the creation and implementation of Title I programs, and allowing for the establishment of high-quality, community-based partnerships and the development of expanded learning programming as part of school improvement and ongoing support.

As the authors of these provisions, we strongly encourage the Department to implement them in a manner that will help ensure that states and local districts develop meaningful and helpful partnerships with community-based and intermediary organizations. As such we encourage the Department to define the term "intermediary organization" as "a nonprofit organization that has expertise in training, forging public-private partnerships, systems development, capacity-building, improving scalability, evaluation, and the effective use of data to improve the progress of students, schools and other educational institutions, and education programs"--a definition which also appears in our bill, the Community Partnerships in Education Act.

We encourage the Department to provide guidance to states outlining best practices for effective partnerships, and emphasizing that including intermediaries and community organizations when assisting struggling schools can help provide expertise and increase capacity. Additionally, as the Department implements the Student Support and Academic Enrichment grant program, we encourage guidance clarifying that collaboration to expand STEM education opportunities can include expanded learning programming and that states and districts can use the expertise of intermediary and community-based organizations in these activities. We also encourage the Department to provide flexibility to states to meet the requirement under the 21st Century Community Learning Centers program that they create a list of external organizations that can help local communities implement grants made under this program--it should be clear that these partners are potential resources and not mandatory partners.

We strongly support highly effective community partnerships in ESSA. We hope that states and districts will be empowered to create and expand partnerships that increase their capacity and broaden their expertise, in order to generate greater educational opportunity for all students. We look forward to working closely with your staff over the upcoming months to ensure that these issues are addressed in rules and guidance put out by your Department. Please do not hesitate to be in touch regarding these, or any other, matters we many collaborate on.

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