Wraparound Services for Students: Are They Working?

Pillar 4 of the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future covers a wide range of wraparound services for student-specific needs. Early signs show significant progress in areas of concentrated poverty, unclear statewide progress on service delivery for special education and multilingual learners, and broad supplemental support from county and state agencies on student mental and behavioral health needs. 

The Blueprint for Maryland’s Future is based on five primary pillars, each covering a touch point of the education continuum. Generally, these pillars focus on:

  • early childhood education
  • hiring and retention
  • career readiness
  • students in need (Pillar 4)
  • transparency and accountability on process, funding, and outcomes

Each of these buckets has very prescriptive strategies for how the plan is intended to unfold as the local school systems work through this educational transformation. The goal, in a nutshell, is to improve and accelerate student outcomes for all, regardless of unique needs and circumstances, as well as broaden the pathways available to students after graduation. The plan also intends to address the needs of teachers and administrators in fulfilling that mission.

A particular hallmark of the program is providing equity of opportunity by establishing and reinforcing what are called “wraparound services” for students facing challenges around ability, language, mental and behavioral health, and basic resources. Most of that mission comprises pillar 4, which is titled, “More Resources for all Students to be Successful.” This pillar also accounts for the highest concentration of new funding requirements and allocations from the Blueprint law. This deep dive will unpack what exactly is in pillar 4, how those wraparound service strategies are intended to be carried out, and what the implementation outlook is for those programs.

What is in Pillar 4?

Pillar 4 is generally focused on making sure that all students, regardless of circumstances, have the resources in place to be successful. It does this by prescribing specific programs to eradicate achievement gaps by ensuring opportunity for every student, regardless of family income, race, ethnicity, or ability. So to start from a funding perspective, this pillar also comprises four of the eight variables that account for a weighted amount of state aid, which are:

  • Multilingual Learner Aid
  • Special Education Aid
  • Compensatory Education Aid
  • Concentration of Poverty Aid

To translate that into primary target recipients of the programs in this pillar, it generally means this pillar is intended to ensure equity in opportunities for success regardless of needs specific to:

  • special education students
  • multilingual learners
  • struggling learners
  • learners in areas of concentrated poverty

Who is focused on Pillar 4 at the State level?

Four primary work groups are intended to study and make recommendations to bolster progress on implementation to guide these local efforts. Below are the major entities, and they are generally organized by a type of need. However, it’s important to acknowledge that many students can fall into more than one of the four identified categories.

As seen above, the special education and multilingual learner groups are geared towards those respective needs. The Pillar 4 Advisory Committee and Consortium groups focus more broadly on struggling learners as a whole who are facing compounding factors from poverty as well as learners experiencing mental and behavioral health challenges. These are also two categories of need that often go hand in hand i.e. circumstances of poverty compound mental and behavioral health challenges. The two are inextricably linked.

Where Do Community Schools Come In?

Community schools are a vital component of pillar 4 because they are evidence-based learning environments intended to remove a matrix of barriers to learning as experienced by resource-scarce communities, particularly in areas of concentrated poverty. As such, community schools are also the only school type eligible, under the Blueprint law, for Concentration of Poverty Grants. It’s important to clarify though that wraparound services are not exclusive to community schools. These are more specifically areas where cumulative challenges stack up and can create a chasm in an already large achievement gap for these populations.

Functionally, community schools focus on the education of a student in areas of concentrated poverty through the lens of addressing all of the needs around the child and the family, including medical needs, nutrition, mental health, social-emotional challenges, housing, employment, and the like.  This is achieved by the community school becoming a hub of community stakeholders to provide the type of wraparound services that address a broader array of challenges.

In practice, this looks like a robust service connection plan for families to locally based health and human service agencies and providers as well as some services that are brought into the community schools like food, transportation, learning specialists, materials, and the like.

Types of wraparound services provided and facilitated by community schools for students and families:

  • extended learning time and longer school years
  • transportation to and from school
  • school-based health care, including vision and dental
  • internal and external social workers, counselors, psychologists, mentors, and coaches
  • healthy food in and out of school
  • professional development for staff to identify and service student needs
  • connection and facilitation with community-based human and family service programs

How is Implementation Going for Pillar 4?

The Blueprint Accountability and Implementation Board (AIB) is tasked with assessing the success of all the pillars and accompanying programs of the plan. Linked here is a snapshot of pillar 4 as an accountability rubric to give a greater sense of what the oversight body will be looking at to account for progress.

To start with, a particularly bright spot of pillar 4 is supporting students in areas of concentrated poverty. According to recent information shared with the Maryland Association of Boards of Education (MABE) by the Maryland State Department of Education (MSDE), community schools have expanded by 73%, with 162 added over the last fiscal year. An additional highlight from the presentation was that, despite weak proficiency ratings statewide, these schools are the sites of the most significant progress in closing achievement gaps in English language arts and mathematics proficiency testing of any category in the state.

These are very positive early signs of success, and that is also while a flood of supplemental funding is still on the way to support adjacent efforts in this area through grants from the Governor’s Office of Children, as well as recent awards from the Maryland Consortium on Coordinated Community Supports. Local recipients include private entities in addition to a long list of county-based service divisions, including local health departments, human service agencies, and local management boards. Moving forward state and local agency coordination will be vital to leverage overall resources efficiently to avoid duplication of effort or over allocation of funds resulting in money being squandered or recaptured.

Forthcoming Opportunities for Pillar 4

Concerning statewide progress in the special education and multilingual learners categories, a recent decision by the Maryland State Board of Education (MSBE) extended the deadline for final reports from the Blueprint Special Education Workgroup to May of 2025. The Workgroup on Multilingual Learners in Public Schools reported out in 2022 but no additional statewide feedback is available on how implementation of that specific component is going. Some jurisdiction-specific blueprint implementation plans touch on progress and challenges in these areas, but broader statewide status might be forthcoming.