Department of Education calls for commitment of community service across universities

College students have long played an important role in supporting younger youth. The afterschool field has benefited from these student’s expertise, enthusiasm, diversity, and near-peer levels of mentorship for decades.

Now, a nationally organized initiative is working to ensure more college students and K-12 systems have opportunities to meaningfully connect. The National Partnership for Student Success (NPSS), an initiative of the U.S. Department of Education, AmeriCorps, and the Everyone Graduates Center at John Hopkins University introduced a new tool encouraging Institutes of Higher Education (IHEs) to support the Biden administration’s visionary goal of providing 250,000 new tutors and mentors for all students in the pre-K-12 educational system across places, times, and settings by 2025.

As part of the work, the Department of Education (ED) recently released a guidance letter to colleges, universities and district leaders asking institutes of higher education  to commit to increasing student participation in community service roles and track data towards their efforts, encouraging those that can to invest at least 15 percent of their Federal Work Study (FWS) funds into student roles in community service activities.

Currently, institutions receiving federal work study must spend at least seven percent of their FWS funds on community service, and a number of schools already exceed that amount on a regular basis. State data on federal work study investments in service and tutoring can be found here.

This initiative can help IHEs already doing significant community service to increase their commitment and showcase their programs. It can also encourage those IHEs that, in the past, had just met the minimum to break down barriers and reap the benefits of increased levels of service to the community, their campus, and the future student body.

In encouraging greater investment in community-based FWS opportunities, the guidance document reminds universities and colleges of important provisions in the law including that:

“The federal share of FWS compensation can reach 100 percent when the FWS student is employed as a reading or math tutor for school-aged children or when they are performing qualifying family literacy activities or civic education activities. The federal share of FWS compensation can be as high as 90 percent when a college student is employed at a nonprofit or at a federal, state, or local public agency, subject to FWS requirements.”

The Department already has a suite of resources available to help colleges and districts coordinate this work including:

• A guide to leveraging partnerships
• Technical assistance
• An early list of colleges that have signed on to the commitment
• A set of voluntary quality standards across the five main support roles: tutoring, mentoring, student success coaching, post-secondary transition coaching and wraparound support coordinators.

The pages also highlight examples such as Syracuse University’s Literacy Corps which through America Reads has been supporting school districts and community partners in classrooms and afterschool since 1997 with federal work study paid tutors trained in areas such as effective tutoring, urban education and community engagement.

What does this mean for afterschool programs?

For programs in the field, this may be a timely opportunity to reach out to your local universities and colleges with the letter and commitment page and ask if they will be participating, mentioning how your program might play a role. Whether the financial aid office, community service office, or president themselves, they may be eager to learn of a quality program in their area that can help make this vision of 250,000 new caring mentors for our youth a reality. You may already know of places to reach out, or use a tool to look for colleges in your area by zip code.

Programs and collaboratives of programs can also work with the AmeriCorps VISTA program to help colleges to coordinate this type of work in the community.

If your program is already working with a university to engage student volunteers or employees of any type, the university may want to build out a larger volunteer base for your program. It is also a great time to highlight that partnership both to the IHE and nationally so others can learn from and build on your model. Send us a short summary of your work and we will make sure NPSS and the Department of Education are aware of the great work you do.