Communities In Schools of the Dallas Region

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Communities In Schools of the Dallas Region (CIS) began service to the North Texas community in 1985. Modeled under the CIS National organization, our mission is to surround students with a community of support, empowering them to stay in school and achieve in life. We provide services to Pre-K-12th grade students at no cost to them or their family, by placing our professional staff on school campuses to provide daily case management and mental health services. These services include school-wide events, such as college and career fairs; targeted programs, such as lunch groups and enrichment clubs; and most notably, individualized services per student to support their greatest needs in academics, attendance and behavior support. In addition to these services, we also operate afterschool and summer programming to select districts and campuses. We currently serve over 100 campuses in 14 school districts across seven counties in North Texas. 

Our Programming:

We partner with a district or an individual campus who recognizes a population of their students need additional care, whether due to academic setbacks, home-related issues or lack of basic needs outside of the classroom. We work with school leaders (principals, administrators, counselors and teachers) to identify which students can benefit from our care, working from the Texas Education Agency’s defined “at-risk” list. These twelve factors are the baseline for our caseload per school, enabling CIS to provide for students who need us the most. While school leaders begin identifying students, CIS hires a professional staff member we call a Site Coordinator—traditionally an educator or social worker, who works on-campus daily, to determine which students will be served. The Site Coordinator will connect with each identified student’s family or guardian for enrollment purposes, and then meets with each student individually, to create a needs assessment. As the needs assessment is created, the Site Coordinator creates a customized service plan for the student, based on three key areas: academics, attendance and behavior. The Site Coordinator then meets with each student twice monthly, if not more frequent, to deliver services and ensure students are gaining the support they need to improve in their case plan. Students also are referred to our Clinical team for consultation, if a mental health need is noted by the school or by our Site Coordinator. Our Clinical team provides one-on-one counseling, group-based services and referrals to external partners, as needed. By supporting a student's needs during the school day, we provide holistic programming to the 10,000+ case managed students we serve annually, plus schoolwide services and basic need supports to the 100,000 students we touch each year.