How Waterbury Public Schools in one semester expanded learning past 150,000 minutes, which is equivalent to two school years in time.

Waterbury Public Schools?is a premier case study on how to expand learning to all students in a sustainable and scalable approach. To expand learning, one must create new avenues for students to receive services and engage in their education outside the traditional school day.

Student Success Agency (SSA) collaborated with Dr. Verna Ruffin, the superintendent of Waterbury Public Schools, and her staff to offer their families afterschool and weekend support services such as tutoring, postsecondary advising, and mental health coaching from students' electronic devices at home or on the go. This suite of services aligned with their district's initiative to produce an individualized student success plan for every student that shows contextualized student-level data and outcomes around academic, career, and social-emotional development.

This unique shift in education is profound because districts like Waterbury are creating new environments for students to connect with resources that were not common before the pandemic. They understood that providing services only during the school day and not meeting students where they are would be detrimental to how students learn today and what students need to endure the losses or challenges that came from the last two years.

Waterbury Public Schools prioritizes student engagement. The district understands that engagement is necessary for students to begin a path toward achievement. They focused less on technology solutions that lack humanization and more on connecting their students to mentors who can build consistent and ongoing relationships with their students. The benefits go past the student as Student Success Agency’s layer of digital mentors, whom we call agents, are near in age, and provide stability to Waterbury's staff and school day. The program's implementation process was light on traditional staff's time and took up a minimal amount of class time, making it a more accessible lift for each of their schools to launch the platform.

The end goal of the partnership is to showcase how expanded learning is possible when ed leaders focus on student engagement and creating an environment for students to advocate for themselves. Third-party research shows that afterschool and weekend support leads to academic achievement, student well-being, and critical transitional skills to develop a postsecondary plan after graduation. To date, over half of Waterbury students engage on the platform monthly and have collected 150,000 minutes, equivalent to two 180-day school years students spend in the classroom! Watch the full video to capture Dr. Ruffin's vision for the partnership with SSA and how students are already leveling up in school and on their aspirational journey.