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.

School partners benefit from our work and our mission by receiving programs [at no cost]. There are a lot of funding issues in Chicago, so our programs are critically important to schools because students don’t have to pay for these programs. The students get exposure inside and outside of the classroom, and often they travel to different parts of the city that they wouldn’t otherwise have an opportunity to visit.

During the 2016-2017 academic year, CIS of Chicago partnered with 135 Chicago public schools to serve nearly 70,000 individual students.