Connect To Educate Collaborative (C2E)
At the core of SOSNOLA’s mission is building partnerships with and between other community organizations for better school quality and equity. Sadly, many schools in underserved communities lack viable supportive and extracurricular activities; and statistics report that students with severely limited or no access to such resources exhibit higher levels of failing grades, dropouts, and deviant behavior.
SOSNOLA helped coordinate the efforts of five education-related organizations to launch the Connect2Educate Collaborate (C2E), which came together to help overcome the inequitable accessibility of some students to high quality community programs operating in public schools. SOSNOLA developed and published the Connect2Educate Notebook, a comprehensive reference guide to high quality public school programs such as after school sports and recreation, arts enhancement, computer and technology learning, mentoring, tutoring and counseling—just to name a few. In tandem, SOSNOLA designed a unique networking event that connects school leaders to program providers. This program is reducing the inequity in after school, in school, and other available inter-school programs held outside school hours.
Public Schools of New Orleans Close-Ups
Save Our Schools NOLA believes that every student, parent and community member deserves access to the most current, accurate and relevant information regarding their public schools. Access to this information will help families in our communities better understand and navigate the new and unique structure of the public education system in New Orleans.
The Close-Ups web portal allows the user to search through schools using an extensive list of criteria such as grade range, programs offered, and student/teacher ratio. This will assist parents in finding the schools that may best suit their children’s needs. The information available ranges from as basic as principal name and school address, to detailed data on social services provided and school performance scores. Additionally, information about chartering foundations and board contacts is provided concerning the city’s many public charter schools. Also available is data regarding school facilities such as planned renovations, number of internet-ready classrooms, and whether the school is currently located at its pre-Katrina site. The website will be updated regularly as new information becomes available, which will increasingly help to enable public awareness of and participation in the ongoing rebuilding of our schools and communities.
