Communities In Schools of the Dallas Region

Thanks for supporting Communities In Schools of the Dallas Region on North Texas Giving Day! 

Please help us exhaust our $10,000 dollar-for-dollar matching gift to help students succeed in school and achieve in life! 

Your dollars help to provide individualized case management support, mental health services, family engagement activities, and post-secondary preparation and success to students in North Texas.  See how your dollars can make a difference.

• $85 provides one family engagement session at a CIS-supported school.
• $350 supports one student for an entire year, on a CIS Campus with support in academics, attendance, and behavior interventions.
• $380 provides home visits for an entire semester to engage with families and learn how we can support student and family needs.
• $500 funds a college or vocational tour for a group of students at one campus, opening doors to future possibilities.
• $1,700 supports five students in developing personalized post-secondary success plans, setting them on a path to achieve their goals

Communities In Schools of the Dallas Region (CIS) began serving 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 after-school and summer programming to select districts and campuses. We currently serve over 100 campuses in 12 school districts across seven counties in North Texas, and a Charter School in Mesquite. 

Our Programming

We partner with a district or an individual campus that 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.

Our New Five-Year Strategic Plan

Through a new, five-year strategic plan that was approved by the Board of Directors in December 2023, the organization is focusing its efforts to deepen the programming provided to its students, after a growth period of expansion, predicated by the COVID-19 pandemic and funded through the Safer Students, Stronger Schools campaign. In this plan, the organization is focused on deepening three programmatic areas: (1) post-secondary success, (2) family engagement and (3) the continued expansion of mental health services. Visit our website to learn about our work and how you can partner with us!