Produced by the Community Education Commission & Executive Board
Homeroom
Detroit
Detroit
Connecting Detroit's future through e-collaboration,
systems coordination & one-front-door
How will we know when we are successful?
When all Detroit families can find community, resources and support to navigate each of life's transitions in real-time.
Building a Family-First Detroit
Homeroom Detroit will be the front door for families and students in the city of Detroit; it is a virtual space to orient, connect, and coordinate. Homeroom Detroit is more than a landing-page.
Imagine a Detroit where:
- A new mother could find child care referrals, housing support, direct connection with other parents and mental health supports right when she needed them most.
- A grandmother could be connected to a dozen different summer learning opportunities for her grandchild through one phone-call or text
- A high school senior with limited English language skills could receive live one-on-one support to complete their FAFSA
This citywide cross-sector collaboration will not only help us create a more cohesive way for students, families, educators and stakeholders to orient themselves, but it will also help us create more equitable, transparent and community-focused ways of sharing resources and networks.
We firmly believe that it is more important than ever to create sustainable ways for our non-profits and service-based organizations to directly connect with those that they serve.
Key Partners
Why is this important right now?
Since the start of Covid-19, the inequities of our systems, the gaps in coordination and the consequences of our fragmented data system have been dramatically on display. Furthermore, those who are hurting the most are from the sectors that we must rally to protect: our city’s children and youth, our educators, our care providers and our fellow non-profits.
This unprecedented e-collaborative seeks to create sustainable solutions for those entities that work tirelessly to stabilize the lives of our Detroit children while reducing the burden on families during moments of crisis.
What are we trying to do?
Build One-Front-Door
Imagine a Detroit where all opportunities and resources could be accessed through one-front-door. One platform that knows no limits. From birth through college and career, Homeroom Detroit will connect our city's most important assets: our children and families with our youth-serving providers.
How do we support a city together?
Modeling our efforts after the impactful work of Detroit’s Early Childhood Partnership, Hope Starts Here, Homeroom Detroit aims to create a community framework around strategic imperatives: early childhood, K-12, afterschool and summer programs, college and career supports and basic needs.
Our partners are key to developing a resource and referral system that not only provides a front door of services and connections to families, but helps to identify gaps, improve on the quality of services and provide timely supports to our children, families and youth-serving partners.
Early Childhood Providers & Care Network
Potential Co-Leads
K-12 School Choice and Transitions
Potential Co-Leads
Afterschool and Summer Programming
Potential Co-Leads
College and Career Supports
Potential Co-Leads
Basic Needs
Potential Co-Leads
How will we approach building an integrated network?
As One Design Team
Working with diverse group of stakeholders, the CEC Leadership and Staff understand how critical it is to approach this systems-level solution work as ONE Design Team committed to addressing common challenges.
For each imperative area, a set of strategy leads will commit to creating the policies, processes and systems by which resources and referrals will operate within each imperative.
- Create ONE starting point for Detroit families from birth through college/career
- Allow for different partners to use one system in varying ways and with limited access to records
- Create a unified system that allows for improved tracking of children and family outcomes (e.g. evaluate impact of resources on academic outcomes, attendance, etc.) and be responsive to the data.
Do you have a feature request?
What is the role of the CEC?
The CEC, including all programming that falls within the umbrella of the CEC, will be guided by actionable theories cultivated from the first phase of research and their potential impact, alignment with the priorities of the CEC and the City of Detroit, and implementation feasibility.
By creating one clear pathway to increase student, parent and community access to information, enrichment and general out-of-school time resources…Detroit will become a city that puts it’s children and families first.
Alignment with CEC priority: access to transparent information and access to information.
Explore Our Current Theories for this Work
- If provided with one central path to access resources and support, more Detroit students and families will be able to re-engage and/or enroll in Detroit-based early learning or K-12 programs.
- Should Detroit @ Work intake consultants utilize Homeroom, more Detroit residents will be able to accept employment and/or training opportunities.
- Homeroom data collection will identify high demand areas that lack resources and/or funding
- Effectively measure service quality of our students and their families via referral response times, referral surveys, and partner insights.
Learning Agenda
What will we be positioned to learn?
To drive our shared development strategies for Homeroom Detroit, the leadership will need to be responsive to data and evaluation systems.
The following questions will drive the work:
- How effective were the Homeroom Detroit partners in their ability to meet the needs of users?
- How effective was Homeroom Detroit in supporting early learning providers, K-12 educators and afterschool/out-of-school time program administrators?
- How effective was the management of the project?
- Did this project meet the selected expectations?
- Were the goals of Homeroom Detroit appropriate and adequate for the project?
- Did the funding impact the intended outcomes?
How will we reflect and respond?
In an Internal Evaluation for Homeroom Detroit, we will plan to include periodic report outs that each imperative lead will collect throughout our pilot (Phase I) work. These reports will be collected by the Homeroom Detroit Project Manager and drafted into a status document or tracking tool. The CEC will structure the report-outs with some formulaic questions.
- Are we meeting our goals?
- Are we on task and on track?
- What is impeding progress?
- What additional resources do I need?
Full project reports to the larger group will happen upon completion of each phase of the pilot planning process. These internal report-outs will allow us as a collaborative team to get progress checks and assess collaborative work.