School Partnerships

The Partnership Program engages a team of CIS of Chicago professionals as specialists in identifying and understanding the needs of a student body. This team builds relationships with school principals, counselors or teachers — called site coordinators — to collaborate on addressing those needs.

Together, the specialist and the site coordinator set a goal of connecting every student in the building with one or more programs or services throughout the school year. These connections have a direct, positive impact on students’ academic performance in reading and math, as documented by a 2015 gold-standard evaluation of our work.

Our school partners benefit from working with us in many ways, but one of which is certainly that they don’t have to worry about doing the legwork of finding these programs that help meet the need. We are there to help make sure that we are supporting meaningful connections between schools and community partners.

During the 2017-2018 academic year, CIS of Chicago partnered with 147 CPS schools and 214 community partners, positively impacting the lives of almost 72,000 students.