UFT / May 24, 2012 “Cincinnati has a seamless integration between day and afterschool, between teachers and community-based organizations. You can’t tell the difference,” she said. “The resource coordinator frees teachers to teach — not what we’re doing a lot in our classrooms, which is triage.”
And so the UFT has just issued an invitation to schools to try out the Cincinnati model, with a start-up grant from the UFT and the City Council. “We want to replicate their best practices,” Alford said. This means grassroots community building, reaching beyond the schoolhouse door to fold in health services, job resources, translation services, help navigating city bureaucracies — whatever the community identifies as its needs.