FAQs

What is Elev8?

Full-Service Community Schools like Elev8 New Mexico combine the best educational and youth development practices and partnerships to ensure that young people are prepared to learn and succeed. Elev8 connects vital services – school-based health care; extended learning before and after school and during the summer; and family engagement and support services.

School-Based Health Centers provide students and families with easily accessible, user-friendly, age-appropriate preventative, primary, mental and dental health care.

Extended Learning before and after school, and during the summer offers a diverse choice of relevant, structured learning activities that are engaging, challenging and connect to the classroom.

Family Engagement & Support: Family supports and resources on school campuses are designed to promote economic stability, good health and continuing education. Family engagement encourages parents to become full partners with the school and increase involvement with their child’s education. Collaboration with the school’s parent association and community members provides opportunities to support school goals and advocate for issues important to families. These two components are housed in a Family Resource Center, a place inside the school where parents, grandparents, other family members, and the students themselves can connect to Elev8 NM services and other school opportunities.

Where are the Elev8 schools and how were they chosen?

The Elev8 initiative is being implemented in New Mexico, Chicago, Oakland and Baltimore with schools, local nonprofits and community partners working together through Elev8 programs that provide integrated service delivery in public middle schools. These local initiatives were selected after considering 35 cities in 22 states. They were chosen by Atlantic Philanthropies and its national advisory board based on criteria that included socio-economic need and disparity, health profiles, academic performance and neighborhood crime data. Some participating schools represent areas with some of the lowest life expectancies and highest rates of asthma hospitalizations, STD diagonosis and teen births in the nationl. Atlantic Philanthropies also looked for locations with leaders and communities with a strong commitment to ensuring that middle school children get the support they deserve to succeed in life and in school.

What is the premise behind Elev8?

Research indicates that out-of-time school learning, health care, family supports and parental involvement can all contribute to a student’s success in school. Elev8 is based on the expectation that the coordinated delivery of these services with a school is more likely to foster change in the lives of disadvantaged children than providing any of these services in isolation.

Models for co-locating service and complementary learning – which aligns classroom learning with opportunities to learn through extended learning programs, cultural organizations, social services and other community resources, exist in many communities. Elev8 goes even further by creating dynamic integration of services within schools, one of the prinicpal environments in which young people spend their time.

Through the Elev8 approach, schools become places to serve the whole child and his or her family as a means of eliminating common roadblocks to educational attainment and creating lasting benefits for the greater community.

What are Elev8’s goals?

By integrating extended learning, health services, family engagement and support into the lives of students, Elev8 intends to have a significant and lasting positive impact on the lives of these students, their families and their ability to succeed both within and beyond their communities. It is designed to assist the local initiatives in creating self-sufficiency for their models over the long term by helping them build strong communications and advocacy plans, as well as identify and utilize local and national funding resources.

In documenting the work as case studies, Elev8 will share the lessons learned and demonstrate the power and potential of  integrated service delivery as a means to positively impact school performance as the movement continues to grow across the country.

With these case studies, Elev8 also intends to influence public policy. The continued work and lessons learned will be shared with local, state and national education leaders and elected officials.

Why Middle Schools?

Young people in their middle school years, ages 10-14, undergo rapid physical, emotional, social and cognitive changes while facing many new challenges and critical choices in their lives. At this stage, many students begin to struggle with their academic work and often feel disaffected from their families, peers and others.

Because this age group faces so many challenges, Elev8 is designed to address as many of these needs as possible through a coordinated effort that takes into account every aspect of their lives. Research indicates that children who enter high school prepared to succeed in the ninth grade are more likely to graduate than peers with less preparation – making middle school an essential link in the chain of success.

A substantial body of research suggests that support provided during the middle school years can be critically important in shaping young people’s futures. But national leaders agree that far too few comprehensive and intensive programs exist for these youth. Elev8 seeks to respond to this need and create a powerful environment for learning from the best practices emerging across isolated initiatives, linking them together through a comprehensive model and applying them within diverse community/school settings.

How is this initiative funded?

The Atlantic Philanthropies has made a substantial investment in the devlopment and initial four-year implementation period for each Elev8 local initiative. In turn, each one is required to obtain matching support for local programs from other public and private sources and continue to identify sources of long-term funding with the goal of being self-sufficient without additional Atlantic funds beyond the initial investment period.