Abby R. Weiss
Child & Youth Readiness Cabinet Manager
Executive Office of Education
Governor Patrick often talks about the importance of governing at the place where policy touches people. Nowhere can that interaction be seen more clearly than in the work of the Child & Youth Readiness Cabinet. Established by Executive Order in October 2008, and co-chaired by Secretary of Education Paul Reville and Secretary of Health and Human Services JudyAnn Bigby, the Readiness Cabinet is the place in state government where state agencies that have an impact on the lives of children, youth and families work together to improve services, and, ultimately, outcomes for our most vulnerable populations.
As the first Manager of the Readiness Cabinet, I have the opportunity to connect and align the work of our education and health and human services agencies (and community partners) to ensure that children and families across the Commonwealth have the supports and tools they need to thrive. The necessity and urgency of this work is clear. As Secretary Reville recently put it in a commentary he co-authored in Ed Week, “Schools will never achieve their goal of 'all students at proficiency' unless they attend to nonschool factors.”
The work of the Readiness Cabinet is taking shape, and through the leadership of the Secretaries, Commissioners and our partners, we have made significant progress. Here’s a sampling of our recent work:
- We are working intensively with three school districts - Holyoke, Springfield, and Worcester - with high populations of low-income families and where many of the state’s lowest performing schools are located. In each community, we have deployed a part-time Liaison (on loan from the Department of Transitional Assistance, the Department of Mental Health, and the Department of Children & Families) who is working with the school district leadership – and the lowest performing schools – to support their ongoing efforts to mitigate the effects of poverty so that children arrive to school healthy and ready to learn. In each district, this work looks somewhat different.
- In Worcester, we are working with district leadership to increase students’ access to mental health services. We are sharing information about best practices in other districts and connecting Worcester Public Schools leadership to experts in the field. Our Cabinet Liaison is also coordinating with the district’s other initiatives – particularly the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education’s Wraparound Zone – to ensure that our work is supportive of Worcester’s priorities.
- In Holyoke, we are aligning with district priorities and initiatives to ensure that our efforts are supportive of their agenda. Holyoke has one full-service community school, the Peck School, that has a full complement of community-based and state agency partners working together to improve outcomes for their students and provide supports for their families. The district is working to expand this model to two other schools. We are learning from the Peck School and its many partnerships about the landscape in Holyoke – and are beginning to identify local agencies (both state and non-governmental) that can be of service to the other schools with which we are working. We are working directly with the two state-designated underperforming schools in the district to be responsive to their specific needs (e.g., mentoring).
- In Springfield, we are working with the district’s Pupil Services team to increase communication with local state agency personnel. To that end, the school district has convened representatives from the local state agencies to discuss collaborating on particular issues of interest to the district. The first conversations have focused on the district’s attendance initiatives and the need for better alignment between state agency policies and the district’s attendance policies. These interagency meetings have produced concrete offers of partnership between local agencies and the school district; DCF, for example, has offered to deploy social work interns to analyze school data for children in DCF custody (and make recommendations to improve their educational outcomes). Next, the interagency group in Springfield will tackle the issue of behavioral/mental health supports for students in the school district and inventory the ways in which the various agencies can assist students in the district.
- We have established an Early Childhood sub-committee of the Cabinet to address the specific issues facing the Commonwealth’s youngest citizens. This sub-committee includes Commissioners from the child-serving agencies and is chaired by Sherri Killins, Commissioner of the Department of Early Education & Care. This group is working towards concrete, inter-agency programming that supports families and readies children for entry into school. The Department of Housing and Community Development, the Department of Transitional Assistance, and the Department of Early Education & Care are discussing possibilities for collaboration.
The Cabinet has several other areas of focus – including eliminating youth violence, one of the Governor’s four priority areas for his second term, and data sharing between human service and education agencies. We are maintaining focus on our overall goal of closing the achievement gap – while remaining responsive to the ever changing and pressing needs of the Commonwealth’s children. This is complicated work – but we are excited about the progress we have made in these past several months and look forward the work ahead.


