Megan Gildin, 2024
The Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) Office of Safe and Healthy Climate is focused on meeting ISBE’s learning conditions goal, which states that “all schools will receive the resources necessary to create safe, healthy, and welcoming learning environments, and will be equipped to meet the unique academic and social and emotional needs of each and every child.” Take a moment to imagine—what does it look like, sound like, and feel like? How might you get there?
With student mental health and well-being needs rising (Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, 2022; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2023; The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory, 2021), these questions have become more critical than ever. For this reason, ISBE’s Office of Safe and Healthy Climate has become involved in overseeing more federal and state initiatives that promote student well-being. ISBE recognized that it had been working reactively to meet students’ increased needs in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and hoped to shift to a more proactive approach, including breaking down silos to build alignment and coherence across its well-being initiatives. With a collective view, departments could gain a better understanding of how and where initiatives are being implemented with an eye to equity, ensuring that school communities are receiving the supports they need.
The Region 9 Comprehensive Center (R9CC) has supported ISBE for the past 3 years in the Wellness Initiatives Inventory and Analysis Project. The goal of this project is to build ISBE staff’s organizational and resource capacities to understand and maximize the value of student well-being initiatives. A core component of this project has been cocreating living strategic documents, or tools, which help break down silos, strengthen connections, and build alignment between the departments within ISBE that support student well-being. These tools include
- program profiles;
- a cross-departmental logic model; and
- strategic goals focused on supporting local education agencies (LEAs), families, and students, as well as building connections across departments.
The process of cross-departmental engagement to cocreate these living documents fostered a reflective space for staff to collaborate around a shared vision and strengthen pathways for supporting student well-being. Collectively, all the departments in the Office of Safe and Healthy Climate were able to think critically about the initiatives they oversee and how they could cooperate across departments to provide school communities with the resources necessary to create safe, healthy, and welcoming learning environments for all students.
Action
Year 1: Building Awareness Across Program Initiatives and Beginning to Build Alignment Across Departments
The ISBE Wellness Department, having recently received significant new funding through the American Rescue Plan, approached R9CC with the goal of building alignment and coherence among the department’s initiatives. With so many new initiatives and staff, the first steps of this process were to build awareness within the department and facilitate connections across initiative teams. R9CC worked with the Wellness director and initiative leads to develop a set of program profiles—single-page summaries that any reader could use to understand the key components of an initiative—as well as a departmental logic model. Although these documents were initially used internally, R9CC discussed with ISBE how they could also be used to support communication with key partners outside of ISBE and school communities.
While codeveloping the program profiles, the Wellness director and R9CC identified connections between the work of the Wellness Department and ISBE’s Student Care Department. R9CC added Student Care initiatives to the program profiles in development, documenting a portfolio of student wellness initiatives that address both prevention and intervention. R9CC then worked with the directors of Wellness and Student Care to develop a cross-departmental logic model and an all-staff convening where staff had the opportunity to find points of commonality and collaboration across initiatives. As a thought partner in the design of the program profiles, the logic model, and the convening, R9CC supported ISBE in Year 1 in building awareness of initiatives across departments and beginning to break down silos in support of improved alignment and coherence across initiatives and departments.
Year 2: Building Alignment and Coherence Across Departments
In Year 2, R9CC and ISBE set the goal of further strengthening alignment and coherence within and across departments. R9CC supported ISBE in expanding and refining the cross-departmental logic model, adding the Office of Safe and Healthy Climate and its initiatives.
To expand the logic model, R9CC planned and facilitated a convening of the executive director of the Office of Safe and Healthy Climate, the Wellness director, the Student Care director, and ISBE’s Social and Emotional Learning lead. Together, with the support of R9CC, the ISBE team identified a collective vision, mission, drivers, and guiding principles. They then documented the initiatives within each department and began listing the types of activities that occurred within these initiatives. They were able to discern five key activities that occurred across departments and initiatives: state policy engagement, resource dissemination, technical assistance, grants and contracts, and regulatory oversight. With these five key activities in mind, the ISBE team then determined the outcomes that guide their work.
The ISBE team collectively shared how helpful it was to have dedicated time to reflect and confer together, and how this would inform their next steps, which included setting department-level goals that aligned with the outcomes and impacts identified in the cross-departmental logic model. The team shared how building the logic model allowed them to see concretely how ISBE’s work interconnects across departments and initiatives.
Year 3: Proactively and Collaboratively Planning for the Future Across All Departments to Increase Alignment and Coherence in Achieving Strategic Goals
In Year 3, R9CC and ISBE folded the Nutrition Department—the final department in the Office of Safe and Healthy Climate—into the collaboration to (a) ensure that the strategic alignment work included all aspects of supporting student well-being and (b) prepare for ISBE’s new strategic plan, which came with the arrival of a new state superintendent. R9CC worked with the executive director of the Office of Safe and Healthy Climate to enhance the strategic alignment and coherence of student well-being initiatives. Building on the effective approach of having a dedicated time and space for strategic collaboration in Year 2, R9CC facilitated a process with leaders from throughout the Office of Safe and Healthy Climate to cocreate action plans that met the strategic goals of the new ISBE strategic plan. In developing these action plans, departmental and office leadership developed pathways that built on their strengths to meet their strategic goals and support greater collaboration and coherence across all four departments over the next 3 years. The Safe and Healthy Climate executive director shared how valuable this work had been, and that it was a turning point in “moving from reactive to proactive in their efforts.”
Impact
In the work of the past 3 years, R9CC has supported ISBE in building its capacity to increase the alignment and coherence of its student well-being initiatives.
By cultivating dedicated spaces and processes to reflect, connect, and strategize together, R9CC helped the ISBE Office of Safe and Healthy Climate team build a shared vision for the future and break down silos to better align and maximize their student well-being initiatives. The ISBE team shared that the work with R9CC has given them a reflective space that they would not otherwise have, and that this space has helped them maintain their focus. The ISBE team also shared that the program profiles and cross-departmental logic model had helped guide them through the transitions associated with departmental staffing, the new state superintendent, and the ISBE strategic plan. In the fast-paced environment of a state education agency, it can be difficult to find time to pause and reflect. However, making time for reflection and collaborative planning can help create more efficient and effective work in the long run.
As we conclude this project, the ISBE team now has a suite of living documents and accompanying processes that they can continue to build on and use as part of their proactive approach to implementing initiatives that provide LEAs, students, and families with the tools they need to support student well-being. The hope is that ISBE can use these living documents to make connections across additional departments to bring its vision to life—one in which each and every child is equipped to make meaningful contributions to society and live life to its fullest potential.
Conclusion
Supporting student well-being is essential in all school communities. It requires a system of supports, and it is vital that all the various supports and initiatives align and cohere. To support alignment and coherence across student well-being initiatives, consider the following:
- Which departments, initiatives, and organizations implement practices to support student well-being?
- What are we doing currently to connect and align these initiatives? What can we strengthen?
- What tools or processes can help us achieve this? Consider how intentional spaces can support the cocreation of tools like program profiles, logic models, and strategic goals.
It has been an immense privilege for R9CC to support ISBE over the past 3 years as it has engaged in this work. We hope other state education agencies and LEAs can take these key practices and tools and incorporate them into their own efforts.