Every Student, Every Family

Escondido

Every Student, Every Family seeks to identify key needs of families within the Escondido area and provide tools to help students graduate high school and prepare themselves for future career success. As a collaborative, we evaluate and address complicated issues affecting students’ ability to thrive, and work to provide coordinated, family-centered home visits. In a community input survey from June 2021, caregivers identified their top needs as:

• 69%: Support with their child’s engagement in learning

• 55%: Their child’s mental health and emotional wellbeing

• 44%: Access to basic needs, such as food and affordable housing

The purpose of home visits is to increase attendance and connect families to needed community resources. Through our partners’ college and career taskforce, we organized 243 total school/community-based organization coordinated home visits to families of at-risk youth. This allowed us to collect input from parents and students so that we were able to accurately address nuanced and pressing issues affecting students’ ability to thrive in school and beyond.

PARTNERS: Escondido Education COMPACT, Escondido Union High School District, Escondido High School, Escondido STEM Collaborative, Interfaith Community Services, Valley High School

City Heights and Lemon Grove

UWSD’s Literacy Pilot Program with Traveling Stories was born out of our core focus on childhood literacy. In its first six months, 44 students across City Heights and Lemon Grove participated in weekly 45-minute sessions with a mentor, a total mentorship investment of 308 hours, focused on building a love for reading. Students also received new books to add to their at-home library. In addition, we hosted a family engagement event which included book giveaways and support to build family reading habits at home.

Traveling Stories fosters a passion for reading and makes it fun by allowing participants to earn prizes for reading and for setting and meeting goals. In measuring the impact, we found that the program had significantly sparked an interest in reading outside of a school setting. In fact, 70% of students reported reading at home between sessions. We look forward to seeing the continued growth of this program and its impact in the coming year!

PARTNERS: City Heights/Weingart Library, County of San Diego Health and Human Services Agency, Feeding San Diego, Interfaith Community Services, Lemon Grove County Library, Lemon Grove School District, San Diego Food Bank, San Diego Hunger Coalition, San Diego Unified School District, Traveling Stories