History

How It Happened

New Orleans Outreach is a non-profit organization whose mission is to improve the quality of public education in our partner schools. We do this by linking volunteers and other community resources with staff and students through programs that respond to the particular needs of each school. New Orleans Outreach gives public school students access to meaningful experiences that increase academic success, develop skills, and inspire them to participate fully in community life. Outreach recruits, trains, and places teachers, scientists, artists, coaches and volunteers in the classroom during the school day, after school, and in the summer. New Orleans Outreach supports some of the city’s most innovative new open-admissions charter schools by garnering resources, both material and human, to deliver an extraordinary array of services that help students succeed.

Although New Orleans Outreach began in September 1993, the impetus and ideas for the program are inextricably linked to two other models for education reform: New Orleans Charter Middle School (formerly James Lewis Extension), the city’s first public charter school, and New Orleans Summerbridge, a youth-taught, summer-intensive program for middle school students. New Orleans Outreach came into existence to meet needs revealed through the development of these two highly successful education reform initiatives.

Summerbridge (now known as the Breakthrough Collaborative) started in New Orleans in 1990. Based on the prototype in San Francisco, Summerbridge recruited local and national high school and college students to teach small classes of their own design to groups of 5-7 middle school children during the summer. The program emphasized experiential learning, multiculturalism, leadership development, and academic skill building. Summerbridge also provided year-round support and retreats for its students.

In the summer of 1992, Jay Altman, the founder of New Orleans Summerbridge, and parents of Summerbridge students, convened to discuss the prospect of applying the Summerbridge model to a year-round public school. Creating a school, however, was a formidable task without the current charter school legislation. Eventually, the Archdiocese leased the team a building in Treme, and Lewis Elementary agreed to adopt an “Extension” middle school, housed in a separate building.

At the end of the first year, Jay Altman realized that James Lewis Extension would greatly improve if the community were actively involved. He asked Jason Moss, a two-year Summerbridge veteran, to design a program that increased the community’s role in public schools. With initial financial support from the Echoing Green Foundation, this program became New Orleans Outreach.

During the 1993-1994 school year, New Orleans Outreach developed a partnership with James Lewis Extension, bringing volunteers into the school and students out into the community. During the 1996-1997 school year New Orleans Outreach expanded to another site, Ronald McNair Elementary School, focusing on developing a strong volunteer-based afterschool program. In 1998 James Lewis Extension became the city’s first public charter school and was renamed New Orleans Charter Middle School (NOCMS). With Outreach’s help the school became the highest performing open-admissions middle school in the city.

Outreach worked to create opportunities for volunteers, including business people, professional artists, writers, and musicians, to bring their talents into the schools, exposing students to a great variety of rich cultural resources and career options. Initial efforts, such as the creation of gardening and career awareness programs utilizing volunteers, eventually blossomed into a more formal and extensive role for Outreach in NOCMS, and then in other school sites. This role included creating elective classes tailored to an individual school, managing quality tutoring and afterschool programs that increase academic achievement, and helping schools to achieve their school improvement goals.

New Orleans Outreach’s involvement at NOCMS was critical to its success in converting to a charter school. For the next few years the Outreach program grew and developed, forging even stronger ties with both NOCMS and McNair. During the 2002-2003 school year, a total of 483 volunteers spent over 7,719 hours providing service to our two partnering schools, with a total enrollment of 677 students.

In August 2003 New Orleans Outreach added two new sites as a result of its partnership with the University of New Orleans College of Education’s 21st Century Community Learning Center. Funding from the state of Louisiana covered the costs of these two new sites, Sophie B. Wright Middle School and Marquis de Lafayette Elementary School, as well as those of the existing afterschool program at McNair School. In June and July 2004 New Orleans Outreach offered its first summer program, combining academic instruction and elective classes for 300 children at three school sites. Beginning in September 2004 Outreach expanded its academic-year program to a fifth school, the Pierre Capdau Charter School.

After Hurricane Katrina in 2005 the New Orleans Outreach lost its offices and most of its program staff moved out of state. However, the storm gave New Orleans, which had one of the worst public school systems in the nation, a unique opportunity for education reform. Specifically, in the wake of this tragedy, the charter school movement has literally taken off, becoming the focal point in the state’s efforts to rebuild education in New Orleans.

New Orleans Outreach’s post-storm mission remains essentially the same, but the focus is now on supporting these new public charter schools by garnering resources, both material and human, to help them succeed at this critical juncture, and by helping schools meet the academic, recreational, and emotional needs of students. Outreach is not only managing and staffing quality programs for children, but is also helping schools to secure grants and inkind contributions, and to form partnerships with other nonprofit organizations that will benefit all.

Because of the new state accountability program, and our schools’ obligation to meet these academic goals, Outreach has begun to focus much more on academic accountability in our programs and services. As a matter of policy, Outreach only works with schools that have no selection criteria and are open to all students. At present, all seven of our school partners are public charter schools, making Outreach a key player in the revitalization of public schools in New Orleans, which has the highest percentage of charter schools of any city in the nation. Our partner schools are: New Orleans Charter Science and Math High School, Langston Hughes Academy, Samuel J. Green Charter School, Arthur Ashe Charter School, John Dibert Community School, New Orleans Charter Science and Math Academy, and McDonogh City Park Academy. During the 2009-10 school year and summer Outreach provided over 76,000 hours of skilled help in our partner schools, using the talents of more than 2,000 volunteers. Outreach has a staff of 18 full-time, several part-time, and 253 paid partners, both organizations and individuals with whom we contract to provide services to children.

How We Work

New Orleans Outreach places a full-time, highly qualified Outreach program manager at each school site. The manager works with principals, parents, teachers, and students to identify the needs and improvement goals of each particular school and then utilizes community resources to create programs in response to those needs.

Many motivated community members want to get involved in public education but often don’t know how or where to begin.  New Orleans Outreach helps by getting to know a potential volunteer’s interests, passions, and skills, then determines how that volunteer can best use his or her skills to benefit students at a particular school.

Similarly, Outreach works with partner schools’ principals and teachers to determine what each school needs most, then finds those resources.  If a school needs tutors, we recruit them, train them, and place them at school sites.  If a school needs teachers for an afterschool program, we find that talent, hire them, and make sure they are a good fit for the particular school’s culture and community.  We also provide professional development to make sure those tutors, artists, volunteers, and other paid professionals have the classroom management skills and knowledge of best practices they need to succeed.

Utilizing a diverse pool of talented, committed individuals and partner organizations, Outreach delivers an extraordinary array of services that help its partner schools help their students succeed.

New Orleans Outreach:

• Creates daytime and afterschool academic and cultural enrichment classes
• Trains and places teaching assistants and tutors (both paid and volunteer)
• Develops special programs such as Power Ties career awareness programs, Healthy Habits workshops, Seamless Transitions early childhood program, and leadership clubs
• Coordinates volunteers for special projects, like school beautification
• Cultivates school partners who bring resources, both human and material, to schools.