Voices for Community Schools: Gia Grier McGinnis

Last week, Community Schools advocates packed City Council chambers for an Education Committee hearing about cuts to the initiative proposed in next year’s city budget. Greater Homewood Voices just caught up with one of those who spoke out in support of Community Schools at the hearing: Gia Grier McGinnis, Assistant Director with the Johns Hopkins University Center for Social Concern.

The Community Schools initiative requires an investment of just over $1 million in public funding through the Family League of Baltimore City each year. Full-time Site Coordinators at Community Schools leverage that investment to bring the goodness of the community into the school, netting $8.5 million in enrichment services to address students' real-life needs. These services range from health screenings to dance classes to after-school tutoring, and they help children thrive personally and academically. GHCC manages three Community Schools in Greater Homewood: Barclay, Guilford, and Waverly Elementary/Middle Schools.

GHV: Tell us a little bit about your role with JHU and the relationship the Center for Social Concern has with GHCC's Community Schools.

Gia: The Center for Social Concern (CSC) is the main hub for direct service to Baltimore City on the JHU Homewood campus. We have 30 programs that work with youth in Baltimore City Public Schools, with a concentration of programs at two GHCC Community Schools: Barclay and Waverly Elementary/Middle Schools. Programs at those schools include dance, Girl Scouts, soccer, creative writing, computer literacy, cooking classes, health education, and environmental education.

Students at Margaret Brent Elementary/Middle School in Charles Village participating in an after-school ballet program sponsored by the JHU Center for Social Concern.

GHV: What inspires you about these partnerships? What are some of the mutual benefits to the kids and the JHU students?

Gia: What I love about these community-campus collaborations is the significant learning and growing that happens on both sides of the program. Our students may not come in knowing much about Baltimore or working in a public school system, but have a wonderful talent they want to share. The students benefit by learning something new, and also by meeting a younger adult who can talk with them about their travels, organically learn about one another's cultures (for example, we have a larger Asian population than other campuses of our size), and what college is like. I think the experiences are eye-opening for all involved.

JHU Soccer Kids program at Waverly Elementary/Middle School

GHV: Why do you think community schools are important to Baltimore? What would happen to the programs the CSC supports if Community Schools funding went away?

Gia: The Community School resource takes a lot of pressure off of principals to budget time and funds for afterschool programming and other enrichment programs, especially in tight economic times. If Community Schools funding went away, I wouldn't say all of our programs would disappear, but I envision us having to scale back on how many programs we have at any one school. Right now student groups are asking to expand—we would not encourage that in any way if the proper supports (in this case, Community Schools) were not in place.

GHV: How did it feel to attend the Education Committee hearing last week and testify in support of an initiative you believe in?

Gia: I was very moved by the other panelists—there was a lot of passion in the room for this issue. I think we all feel this is important and should (hopefully) be a no-brainer for the City Council. The chambers were packed with supporters wearing red to show their support. One of the Council members remarked to me before the hearing that the usual crowd at these hearings is about 15 people, so the turnout should tell them something!

GHV: What did you tell City Council, and what do you think is important for everyone to know about Community Schools, especially as our elected officials near a decision on next year's budget?

Gia: Schools without this resource may leverage programs, but at a much slower rate and they struggle to do so consistently. Being able to reach out to GHCC’s Community School Site Coordinators has made things much easier for our office in terms of program allocation and management. I think an important point that several people echoed is that having a Community School Site Coordinator onsite often makes the crucial difference between a program happening and a program not happening.

Sustainability Resources for Home and Work

As promised on Monday, we have a few resources to share with you from our recent participation it the Johns Hopkins University Climate Showcase project.

Our friends at JHU provided us with reference sheets to help you make your home and office more energy efficient.

• Green Buyers Guide: this quick reference sheet gives you some ideas for energy-saving products you can buy for your home or office. Already doing all that or want to try something else? Check out this starter sheet on composting your yard and food waste.
• Sustainability Education and Engagement Resources: if you're in a position to reach out to others about sustainable life and work practices, this is the guide for you. It contains resources for educating youth, adults, and homeowners.

Climate Showcase an Eye-Opening Experience

Submitted by Tyson Smith

I think anyone who knows me would say that I’m not particularly environmentally aware.  I mean, I recycle, but that’s easy.  I turn off the air conditioner when I leave my office because that makes sense to me.  But I just don’t see the big environmental picture as a priority.  I like to make jokes about “loving the earth” as a reason to do or not to do something.  I’m that kind of guy.

Naturally, then, I found it kind of a challenge to act as the point person for GHCC’s participation in the Johns Hopkins University Climate Showcase Program, a summer initiative all about building environmental sustainability in Baltimore non-profits.  Skepticism aside, this represented nearly a week of my time in meeting with two JHU interns, touring them around our building, facilitating staff-brainstorming sessions, etc.

Of course, I wouldn’t be writing about the experience if it had been a waste of time, so I’ll cut to the chase and say that GHCC’s participation in the JHU Climate Showcase was a wonderful and valuable experience.

The JHU interns who facilitated the process, Sean Murphy and Olugbenga Adeyinka, were excellent resources.  They offered practical advice, both in terms of the physical factors of environmental sustainability—how much water flows through your toilet, quality of light fixtures, etc.—and  what an agency like GHCC can do to help promote environmental sustainability in the community.

As a participant in the program, GHCC was provided with a number of resources, specifically tailored to our perspective as a community-based non-profit, about environmental sustainability.  These resources ranged from quick tips about how to live a more environmentally-friendly lifestyle to specific documents about buying green office supplies, home improvement supplies, etc.  We can now share this knowledge with communities throughout Greater Homewood—in fact, we'll even be offering some tips on this blog later in the week.

Maybe the best outcome, though, was bringing all of GHCC’s programs together to have this kind of environmentally-based conversation.  Through the Climate Showcase, we gathered staff to brainstorm ways for GHCC to integrate green practices, philosophies and goals into our organizational culture.  The interns’ assessment of GHCC, I am happy to say, was that we were in pretty good shape.

And I guess the real victory here is that I learned that being environmentally conscious isn’t that arduous.  It’s relatively easy, and pretty important, so I’m going to try to increase my personal level of participation.  Thanks to Benga, Sean and to the Johns Hopkins University for this excellent opportunity!

JHU to Host Science and Research Job Fair

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COACH Celebrates First Semester in Baltimore

2008-2009 COACH volunteers (l to r) Tasmim Anwar, Catherine Coleman, Paul Hsiao, and Faraz Khalik

Long before you attend your first class, just getting into college these days is hard work: selecting where to apply, taking the SAT, writing essays, searching for financial aid, and finally deciding on the school that's right for you. This fall, GHCC is giving twelfth-graders at three north central Baltimore public high schools some extra help along the way.

The College Opportunity and Career Help (COACH) program is working at Western High School, Baltimore City College, and Mergenthaler Vocational-Technical High School. COACH matches seniors at Baltimore City public high schools with volunteer mentors who are undergraduates at Johns Hopkins University. Mentors meet with their students each week throughout the school year to help them through the college application and career planning process.

With the first semester of COACH in Baltimore complete, evaluations from our students and volunteers are showing that the program is making a difference:

• "I love my COACH advisor. She is very helpful and relatable and understanding." --Marissa, Mergenthaler Vocational-Technical High School
• "The sense of security [of] knowing someone who has been through the process is very helpful and talking to the coaches is very reassuring." --Darren, Baltimore City College
• "It's nice to know there is someone who cares about my education as much as I do." --Shawna, Mergenthaler Vocational-Technical High School
• "I definitely would want to return to COACH next year and continue with it every year I spend at Hopkins." --Amy, COACH volunteer
• "It is a great program and I wish every high school student was able to use this program." --Neikita, Western High School

The COACH program was created in 1999 by two Harvard professors as a way to encourage college access for public high school students in Boston. This is the first year that COACH has been licensed by the Education Resources Institute to operate outside of Massachusetts, and it's being led in Baltimore by GHCC staffer Frankie Gamber, who was a COACH volunteer during her senior year of college in 2002-2003.