Monique Debi is the chief academic officer of Concentric Education Solutions, a Detroit and Baltimore-based organization dedicated to helping mentor and tutor students who may have been displaced for a variety of reasons.
Debi spoke with rolling out about the organization and how it helps kids through support and understanding.
Tell us about Concentric Education Solutions.
Concentric Education Solutions is a student support organization that was designed to help schools identify barriers to student success. And so we’re helping not just schools, but their families and the community, and figuring out what’s happening with students as to why they’re disengaged from school. [We find out] why they may not come to school regularly. [We’re] able to help partner with our stakeholders to ensure that once we get our kids back to school, they stay in school.
What are some of the barriers and problems that children usually face?
We engage in home visits to have conversations with families, caregivers, and our students, and what we’ve found out is there are multiple barriers to student success. It may be that there’s not a solid structure at home to support a child going to school, it may be that the child is the oldest sibling and is caring for younger siblings, or it may be a lack of resources such as uniforms and shoes.
We’ve also seen where some kids didn’t come to school for three weeks because they couldn’t get a haircut. Growing up as an African American child, you can’t go to school looking a certain way. Your appearance matters a lot. Also, our families take pride in those types of things, so sending your child to school unkempt is just not something that’s smiled upon in our community. Kids won’t go to school because of those things.
We’ve found that there may be sometimes health issues, lack of immunizations, or just different reasons that kids aren’t able to come to school when they need to. We help with getting those narratives and stories back to the school team and leadership so that they can start to deliver solutions to those issues.
