Baltimore's students are filled with talent, dreams, and enormous potential. Our responsibility is to help them develop the knowledge and skills they need to pursue the future that calls them. Building a Generation: City Schools’ Blueprint for Success lays out how we are making that happen.

Based on research and conversations with hundreds of stakeholders, the blueprint focuses on three areas to help students reach their goals:

•    Student wholeness
•    Literacy
•    Staff leadership

These areas go hand in hand: If students are motivated and excited about learning, have the skills to think critically, analyze deeply, and express themselves powerfully, and have adults around them who encourage them to persist and excel, they can progress toward high school graduation and postsecondary success.

Our students are unique people with unique experiences, talents, challenges, and social, emotional, and physical lives. By keeping the wholeness of our students in mind, meeting their needs, hearing their voices, and building partnerships with their families and communities, we can ignite their passion for learning.

Work in the area of "student wholeness" takes many forms. For example:

• Schools are supporting students' social and emotional learning, helping them develop confidence, manage stress and emotions, collaborate and negotiate conflict, and make responsible decisions. These are all important skills throughout life, and they support learning across academic areas as well.

• Restorative practices build positive communities based on the premise that open, respectful communication helps reduce conflict. When conflict does occur, restorative practices encourage students to focus not on punishment, but on the harm caused and on ways to repair relationships. 

• A range of health and wellness services — from providing free meals to health services and athletics programs — support students physically and mentally so they are able and ready to learn.

• A well-rounded curriculum, with art, world language, technology, and a range of options to meet students interests, along with extracurricular clubs and teams, keeps students engaged and motivated to come to school every day.

When reading, writing, speaking, and listening are part of learning in all subject areas, students gain complex knowledge, deep conceptual understanding, and the ability to write well and express themselves powerfully. This is the literacy our students want and deserve in order to access what interests them, and it is what they need for success not only in all school subjects, but in careers and in life.

To support students in reaching their goals, City Schools is focusing on professional learning for staff:

• The Wit & Wisdom curriculum, used in elementary and middle grades beginning in the 2018-19 school year, includes texts that students can relate to, a strong focus on writing, connections across the curriculum, integration of arts, and clear connections to state standards.

• Literacy coaches at an initial 20 schools are serving as on-site experts on the curriculum to provide direct support to teacher teams.

• At all schools, the staff member who serves as the literacy representative is receiving additional opportunities for professional learning.

• Teachers at grades 3 to 5, 6, and 9 are receiving focused training on best practices in teaching higher order literacy skills across content areas, including both reading and writing.