Heather FeinsteinJournal #1
Three weeks into my summer, I have a great handle on what this summer will be about. Previously, I attended the two-day Foundations workshop with Education Pioneers and have been getting my hands wet in my new role at DC Public Schools, which is in the Office of Professional Development.
During the first two weeks here, I helped with a few projects my team was finishing up. It was really helpful to be working on a few random things prior to the big lift of my summer project, as this gave me a good sense of how the Central Office runs, as well as the landscape of the schools in the system.
At the start of my third week, I had a clarifying conversation with my supervisor about all the moving parts of my project, and from this I created my Project Plan, which includes a project scope, project deliverables, and a timeline/workplan that lays out specific weekly deliverables. I’ll be formally checking in with my supervisor on a weekly basis, but we talk informally when I have questions at least once a day. The team I’m working within is also extremely helpful, and I often go to them first when what I need is background information.
My project for the summer is to plan the second year of the School-Based Coaches program, which replaced the off-site, workshop style of professional development last year. I will be creating the presentations for the training the Office of Professional Development will give to these coaches, but I’ve added several elements to ensure that I am stretching my skills this summer. The first is that I’ve redefined the measures of accountability and effectiveness that the project will use. In conjunction with this, I’ve added P2P groups – a type of cohort experience for the school-based coaches – whose structure I actually took from the Social Enterprise Club P2P groups, though they’ve taken on a very different form and no longer closely resemble ours at school. I’ve also added a support binder and, most importantly, a budget that will map out how each expense effects the district’s overarching goals for students.
I’m also on an Innovation Team Project here at DCPS for which I’ll be doing that same budget mapping for the entire district budget, which is how I added the same piece to my larger project.
Finally, I have joined the strategy team for the internship program here (as a summer fellow at DCPS I am also part of their larger summer program, the Urban Education Leadership Internship Program). In this capacity, I will be spearheading the rebranding efforts.
I have clearly put a lot on my plate – and I haven’t even been to one of my weekly Education Pioneers workshops yet (that starts tomorrow!) – but one of my goals this summer is to get experience in as many roles as possible so that I can have a better idea about what kind of job I want to find for after I graduate, and I’m finding that exposure is the best way to do this.
Journal #2
With two weeks left in my summer, I have finished the bulk of my work and am working to pull things together and develop final presentations.
Last week I attended my last of the Education Pioneers workshops. The five workshops, over the course of the summer, addressed the topics: students and their families, human capital, urban school models, school choice, and out of school time. Each included a variety of discussions and group activities, a panel with leading DC practitioners, and a small group Innovative Action Project in which we take the theories from the day and develop a concrete action plan for implementing change.
In my placement at DC Public Schools, I have created most of the plan for the Instructional Coaches program. Having laid out a detailed workplan in the beginning of the summer, my progress throughout the summer was fairly constant. I did have to be flexible with the workplan, knowing that things would get moved around, added, and deleted, but having it enabled me to maintain focus and accomplish work at a steady pace. I have also managed this by meeting weekly to check in with my supervisor. During these meetings, we review any new documents or work I’ve completed. Additionally, I ask specific questions that have come up and we discuss the things I will be doing in the coming week.
My work with the Strategy Committee also revved up. As the lead on the branding efforts, I helped create a mission statement and core values. I have also been writing the content for a new website that the Urban Education Leaders Internship Program (the intern program at DC Public Schools) will host on the new DC Public Schools Web site. This has been an exciting opportunity to help connect the public image and recruiting efforts in a strategic way.
My project with the Office of the CFO has progressed and we are nearly finished. We recently presented our findings to the CFO and will be presenting an edited version of that to a group of the district’s chiefs at the end of the summer.
Journal #3
I am currently working on a chaplain staffing analysis for Rikers Island. The Board of Corrections mandates certain standards of religious service which must be provided to New York City inmates. For instance, the Department of Corrections must provide a once a week service for each of the four major religions in the inmate community (defined as Catholicism, Judaism, Islam and Protestantism.) The DOC must also provide one-on-one counseling for inmates within 24 hours of a request. The DOC ministerial staff provides all mandated services for inmates and a variety of others including notification to families in cases of inmate death, Bible and Qu’anic study and employee counseling. I am performing an analysis of current chaplaincy staff levels to determine the appropriate number of chaplains Rikers Island needs to perform mandated and other functions.
Some of the interesting issues that are coming up in the course of this study are inmate/staff religious affiliation disparities, usage of volunteer workers and how to handle inmates of religious persuasions not represented amongst the clergy. In the first case, it is important to try and balance the percentage of inmates of a given religious affiliation with the percentage of clergy of those affiliations. This is made difficult, however, by having 10 different jails which need religious staff. Not all jails can be staffed with a chaplain of all four major religions, but all four must be represented in large enough numbers to conduct regular religious services in each facility. In the case of volunteers, they can be invaluable in offering services that the chaplaincy staff doesn’t have time to provide, but as civilians they require extra security, so we have to balance their hours with officer availability. All inmates must have access to counselors of their religious faith and there are many more religions than those represented by the clergy, so the ministerial staff is also very involved in brining in counselors of other faiths.
We are still gathering data, but it is clear that a lot of variables will need to be considered in the final decision and it is a very timely and complex project.
