As part of the national GRAD Partnership for Student Success, Rural Schools Collaborative is pleased to highlight 50 schools who are implementing student success systems as part of a rural and small school cohort project. This feature comes from rural Northern California, Alabama, and Mississippi, and is supported by RSC’s Black Belt Regional Hub partners at The University of West Alabama and RSC’s Northern California Regional Hub partners at North State Together. Read more about the project here.

Since 2022, RSC has worked closely with several of our Regional Hub Partners to launch pilot cohorts of participating schools in the GRAD Partnership for Advancing Student Success Systems. Led by the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University, the GRAD Partnership is a national initiative that encourages and supports communities in efforts to use high quality student success systems that empower schools to graduate all students ready for the future. The first cohort (2022-2024) featured 20 diverse rural schools in Far Northern California and the Black Belt, and each region’s ten schools have been active in implementing Student Success Systems in their unique rural contexts.
As these schools enter their third year participating in the project, focusing on student agency, connectedness, and belonging has become central to their efforts at engaging students and improving key metrics like attendance, chronic absenteeism, and course failures. Back to school is an exciting and busy time for schools, and GRAD Partnership lead Susan Schroth visited the ten rural high schools in far Northern California to help launch year three of Student Success Systems and to check on progress of targeted initiatives. In the Black Belt, GRAD Partnership lead Annah Rogers also visited the 10 rural schools she works with to check-in and share updates about what year three has in store for the schools.


In both rural regions, school administrators reported that the launch of this year feels different following two years of intentional efforts to build school culture. Keeping students at the center of all interventions, school staff identified individual needs of students while engaging all students in fostering positive school connections. At Redding School of the Arts in Northern California, school leaders started an Associated Student Body (ASB) club. The school-wide impact of ASB has been significant in building positive school culture. Additionally, the ASB club has also reached individual students who longed for connection. One such student is even “threatening to run for ASB President;” staff reported that they never would have imagined that student wanting to take a leadership role, highlighting the impact of focusing on connection and implementing changes with student input and leadership.


At the University Charter school in Alabama, efforts to enhance student connectedness and belonging have been ramped up for Year 3. The school is now making more targeted efforts to use their school ‘house’ system, where students across grade levels are sorted into school houses (similar to the sorting process in Harry Potter), to foster a sense of belonging. This year students will have more opportunities to complete house activities and competitions to build connections with other students and the faculty and staff in their houses.

Chronic absenteeism interventions have also evolved and grown with Student Success Systems. In the past, when students were absent, a punitive consequence was the norm, such as requiring that absent students report to the library during the student's lunch period. Fall River and Burney High Schools in Northern California shared that they are having greater success by celebrating school attendance, both individual and grade level. This aligns with national GRAD Partnership data that shows that over the last two years across all GRAD Partnership schools, there is a 5.4% decline in chronic absenteeism and a 9.2% decrease in course failures for 9th grades, a critical grade and age for interventions.

At Sumter Central High School in Alabama, the new school administration is focusing on making attendance visible and generating competition across grade-levels to promote attendance and reach target goals. Moreover, with more intentional efforts to discover the root cause of a student’s chronic absenteeism, staff are discovering mental health concerns and similar challenges underlying missed classes, leading to more targeted interventions. These changes have created a sense of hope that students will attend school, feel connected while there, and have an overall greater sense of well-being.


At each school site, Susan heard similar stories of how the start of this year feels awesome for students and staff. Annah noted that schools are wanting to build upon their efforts from previous years – whether that be by implementing new initiatives or adding more data points to their Student Success Team’s focus. Collectively, the RSC Team, Intermediaries, and school leaders are all excited to see what year three of the GRAD Partnership for Student Success will bring as we continue to keep students at the center of all efforts!
Rural Schools Collaborative is thrilled to include three new Intermediaries to the GRAD Partnership’s rural cohort this year. The Rural Education Institute (REI) in the College of Education at East Carolina University, Arizona Rural Schools Association, and Missouri State University’s Center for Rural Education will join The University of West Alabama and California’s North State Together in this coast-to-coast effort. The three new Intermediaries will work with their cohorts of ten schools in their respective regions to implement Student Success Systems, and learn from Cohort I successes along the way.
Special thanks to RSC’s GRAD Partnership for Student Success cohort in the Northern California and Alabama & Black Belt regions. This story was provided by Susan Schroth at North State Together and Shasta College and Annah Rogers of the University of West Alabama. Learn more about the GRAD Partnership here.