Full Service + Student Support

Bridge Boston believes that students learn best in a school that has an intentional focus on the elimination of barriers to learning through vibrant community partnerships that allow the school to meet the health and social service needs of its students.

That's why we have our Student Support Team (SST)!

What is Student Support?

Bridge Boston has a clearly defined history of honoring and uplifting students with the greatest need. When our community alerts us, we are not afraid to face big problems head-on. The ethos of Bridge Boston is to respond by removing barriers, supporting our community, and to never back down when our community expresses a need. We know we are equipped with the resources to support our students and our school community, no matter the issue. Our mission challenges us to step up and respond, no matter how big or audacious.

Bridge Boston knows that listening to our community is how we determine and meet the greatest needs around us. We want our parents to let us know what works best for you so that we can best support you. We are committed to modifying our programming to ensure all members of the community feel heard, including our 110 staff, 335 students, and countless parents and family members impacted by our work. We take feedback seriously -- when our community asks for something, we listen.

Who is the Student Support Team?

BBCS’s unique Student Support Team is composed of our Director of Student Support, 2 School Counselors, 2 Deans of Students, School Nurse and School Principal committed to family engagement. Collectively, they support our students and staff by addressing behavioral, environmental, or social-emotional barriers. Our SST looks at the macro-level concerns that face the members of our school community: everything from financial insecurity to the need for summer or after school care, and work to develop in-house solutions, or partner with an existing community agency to ensure the need is met. They meet with teachers, students, and families for one-on-one for assistance, and also host events and workshops for different groups to learn more about Student Support.

Last year, Bridge saw a chronic absenteeism rate at 22% compared to the state average of 19.6%. With the hopes to decrease the absenteeism rate to 15% this year, our SST launched an Attendance Advisory with the intention of reducing chronic absenteeism and to inform the importance of being at school all day, every day. After implementing the advisory, we have currently reduced our absenteeism to 11% this year! ! Our SST is essential to building relationships with our families and ensuring our students have what they need to get to school.

What does the Student Support Team do?

While supporting students is at the core of the SST’s mission, they know that providing resources and intervention with staff and families are essential to ensuring our students can overcome barriers to learning.

SST + Staff

Periodically, Bridge’s Deans and Counselors hold “Office Hours” for our teachers to receive guidance and support for their classrooms. Office Hours were established with the intention of decreasing the number of students who referred for social emotional support. Through the Office Hours, the SST and educators brainstorm reasons why students engage in certain behaviors and develop intervention strategies. We know that if a student’s behavior is ongoing after intervention methods, it’s often a signal of instability somewhere else in the child’s life. Through SST’s office hours, our team can better determine how to effectively escalate the individual support our educators and students need.

SST + Students

Our Student Support Team wants to ensure our students are not just prepared for school, but for the life ahead of them. This is why our Deans have implemented weekly Restorative Justice Circles. Coming from a Native Tradition and research at Suffolk University, “RJ” circles are one approach to addressing the School to Prison pipeline.

Once a week, our Deans enter classrooms to facilitate conversations after harm has been done. Through guided conversations, our students learn about the consequences of their actions, the effect they have on their community, and have a space to reflect on how the actions of their community has made them feel. Circles don’t always take place after harm, and usually are guided age-appropriate conversations surrounding safety, peer pressure, and bullying. RJ circles help our students express themselves, their needs, and their concerns, as well as develop a better understanding of their peers’ perspectives.

When our students participate in their peer community and identify a trusting adult, they are less likely to act in ways that hurt others around them. Since our SST has instated RJ circles, we have seen a drop in the number of out-of-school suspensions – from 7.6% of students last year to only 2.7% of students this year. 

SST + Families

While many of SST’s solutions are generated in-house at Bridge, we know that many of our families need significant forms of intervention. Here, the SST leans on their System of Care, meaning their network of local agencies with resources our families may find useful down the road. Our SST makes a significant effort to ensure these agencies are within 5 miles of Bridge for accessibility. By maintaining a contact catalogue, our SST can connect our families with a wide array of services outside of our expertise. For example, M&T Bank has offered several financial literacy classes to our families at our Parent Academy, Bowdoin Street Health Center holds weekly pro-active drug safety classes with our 8th graders, and MM Therapy provides telehealth mental health counseling for families with an incredible turnaround time (and accepts MassHealth, which is important to many of our community members). Our SST’s System of Care allows them to connect our families with significant resources to overcome barriers.

What does “Full Service” mean to Bridge Boston’s own Student Support Team?

As shown by our Student Support Team, Bridge has never been a “traditional” place and our commitment to our community has never been contained in traditional notions of what a school is about. Furthermore, this speaks to the core of what a charter school is, fundamentally: We’re not “just schools.” We exist to take on big challenges, and to listen to our community when they have a need.

To our SST, “full service” means looking at all angles of who supports and impacts our students. It’s not just addressing our students' needs, but also the needs of people who are supporting the child. We want our families to succeed, not just our students.