Say Yes Cleveland is running according to plan

Written by Rachel Abbey McCafferty on Crain's Cleveland Business on 9/22/2019

It's early, but so far, the rollout of Say Yes to Education Cleveland has been going as planned.

Hundreds of students qualified for scholarship funding and were matched with mentors after graduation in the spring, and wraparound services launched in 16 schools this fall.

Cleveland was officially named a Say Yes to Education community in January. Communities and cohorts in the Say Yes network provide students with comprehensive wraparound support services and scholarships toward post-secondary education. The national Say Yes to Education organization, based in New York, provides support and some initial funding, but the programs are locally run.

Diane Downing, executive director of Say Yes Cleveland, said there are "a lot of moving pieces and parts," but those parts are all moving forward.

Take the scholarship component. To qualify for a Say Yes scholarship, Cleveland Metropolitan School District students have to meet basic eligibility requirements and complete a number of steps, such as finishing the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) and being accepted to a school.

Downing said that, as of Sept. 13, almost 800 class of 2019 graduates had completed all the steps for a Say Yes scholarship; another 170 had completed all but one of the steps. Final numbers won't be available until after college drop/add periods, but Downing said those figures were "very, very close" to the 800 students the program expected to award scholarships to in its first year.

As for the support services, those are being rolled out over time. This year, there are 16 schools in the district receiving additional supports. Within four years, Cleveland plans to implement those supports in all its schools, faster than the six-year timeline required by Say Yes.

The 16 schools already have family support specialists on staff to help connect students and their families with resources in and out of the schools. That could range from mental health services to housing resources to GED programs, explained Lisa Baskin-Naylor, director of community engagement and wraparound strategy for the district. Part of the specialists' role will be to build relationships with the families at each building.

In addition to the family support specialists, the Legal Aid Society of Cleveland and the Cleveland Metropolitan Bar Association will work together to provide legal services to students and their families in the 16 schools, Downing said. And Say Yes Cleveland is finalizing plans for afterschool programming and mental health services in the schools.

The support services are important because a lot of Cleveland students and their families deal with nonacademic barriers, Baskin-Naylor said. That has to be addressed if the district wants students to graduate and go on to postsecondary options.

"In order to do that, we have to remove all of those barriers to help them walk across the stage," she said.

Baskin-Naylor has overseen the district's wraparound strategy for almost nine years, so Say Yes to Education is an extension of that work. Say Yes Cleveland will make the district's approach to support services more widespread and equitable, putting all schools on an "even playing field," she said. But the services will look different in every school, as the needs at each building vary.

Volunteers have been working on the planning and implementation of the different components of the Say Yes Cleveland program. Downing said more than 100 have been involved in that work so far — and that doesn't include the mentors who signed up to work with graduates receiving the scholarships. Cleveland was the first Say Yes community to launch with a plan to match every scholarship recipient with a mentor.

This year, College Now Greater Cleveland is working with about 1,700 mentor/mentee pairs, said CEO Lee Friedman. That includes the approximately 800 students being matched with mentors for Say Yes, but also for College Now's other mentorship programs. Friedman estimated the addition of Say Yes created about 600 additional pairs, as some of the students would have been in other mentorship programs anyway.

As Say Yes scales up, College Now will need to recruit more mentors. Friedman said the organization will begin its big recruitment push later this fall.

"The community has just been amazing," Friedman said.

That leaves the question of funding. Say Yes Cleveland already has raised about 73% of what it needs to sustain its scholarship fund for 25 years. The goal is for the program to raise $125 million; to date, it has raised about $91 million, Downing said. That figure stood closer to $88 million when the chapter was announced.

Beyond scholarships, Downing said Say Yes Cleveland is still "braiding" together the funding it needs to fully implement the program beyond the seed money from the national organization. For example, there have been commitments from the county and the school district to pay the salaries and benefits of the family support specialists, and a task force is studying how the philanthropic community can get more involved as the program grows.

Say Yes Cleveland has, from the start, been a study in collaboration.

"From the very beginning of the planning for Say Yes, the announcement of the chapter, and the work that we've been doing to get student scholarships, as well as to get these services in the schools, has really been and is and continues to be a community effort," Downing said.

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