Dear North State Community,

It is hard to believe all that has changed since our first North State Together 2.0 Newsletter sent to you just a short month ago. With the rest of the nation and the world, we have been reeling with the fast-paced turn of events as we all manage the national health pandemic created by the exponential spread of COVID-19. Like most other places, our staff at North State Together is working remotely, and we are finding new ways to be in community, to be together, and to uphold one another and our work.

The collective impact model is a framework which calls upon different actors in the impact ecosystem – government, business, public health, nonprofits, philanthropy, and other community stakeholders to collaborate in a structured way towards solving a specific social problem. As this novel virus emerges in the North State, we are called upon to collectively implement community mitigation strategies in order to slow the transmission of disease and protect our at risk community members and critical infrastructure workforce. Our county collective impact networks will be needed now more than ever to address the impacts of the current pandemic as well as the aftermath when we begin the process of recovery in our region.

This is a challenging time to be in education. I commend all those who are working tirelessly to see that our students across all levels of the educational pipeline are served during the current shelter-in-place order through enrichment opportunities in our K-12 system and online distance learning at our community colleges. The North State Together backbone team is here to support you and your county networks during these unprecedented times. We have established a regional COVID-19 website which will continually be updated to provided guidance, data, and online resources to keep you informed and help you to make data-driven decisions.

northstatetogether.org/covid19.

I know the dedication and inventiveness you bring to our communities will enable us to navigate these hardships. We encourage you to reach out to the North State Together backbone team if we can further support you. We are all in this, together.

Sincerely,

Kevin O'Rorke

Chief Executive Officer

North State Together

"No single organization, no matter how powerful or innovative, can tackle future challenges in isolation."

Closing schools and transitioning to online learning is critical to stymying the spread of COVID-19, but relying on remote learning and online classes also exposes our region’s deep digital divide. North State Together's data specialist, James Crandall, has been working diligently since the pandemic was declared to provide our county network partners with information to make data-driven decisions.

A student is considered “chronically absent” if he or she is absent 10 percent or more of the instructional days they are enrolled to attend. Missing school can have a snowball effect. Students with

frequent absences are less likely to be able to read by the end of the 3rd grade, are more likely to drop out in high school, and show less persistence in college. Our rural communities in the North State see higher absenteeism rates than the more urban ares in our region. In addition, there are wide disparities among racial and ethnic groups. For American Indian students the difference is striking. Each of our county networks Reach Higher Shasta ,  Expect More Tehama ,  Advancing Modoc Youth ,  Trinity Together Cradle to Career Partnership , and Cradle to Careers for Siskiyou have all made efforts to increase school attendance.  

Adding to our region's complex attendance factors, the North State has experienced many environmental factors in recent school years including devastating wildfires, snowstorms, and our current COVID-19 public health emergency. Our school systems over our large geographic region took early appropriate preventative actions with guidance from local and state public health authorities to close schools. Our county collective impact networks can begin planning now on expanding their school attendance initiatives for when our students and teachers return to the classroom.

Chronic absence data offers a unique tool for spotlighting where we can focus our efforts.

Atkinson, Andelson, Loya, Ruud & Romo will continue to provide up-to-date information in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and its significant impact on our educational institutions. Our complimentary webinars will provide updated information two times per week concerning executive orders, new legislation and recommendations from government agencies.