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Like many school districts across America, California’s New Haven Unified School District is trying to narrow its achievement and graduation gaps. And it’s using design thinking to do it.

“Young people are pushed out of a school system that doesn’t love and accept them,” Dr. Arlando Smith, co-superintendent of NHUS, said at the UC Exceed GradNation Community Summit on Sept. 24. “It just tolerates them.”

Union City Kids’ Zone convened the GradNation summit to engage the full community in developing new ways to raise graduation rates for all district students. More than 150 students, community members, parents, educators, service providers, business representatives, and elected officials attended.

What Pushes Students Out of School

The summit was led mostly by students, and they created this video to report on reasons young people from Union City leave school without graduating.

Similar to the 2014 report Don’t Call Them Dropouts, the video explored how race,  poverty, and challenges outside of school are often greater determinants of academic outcomes than what happens inside school walls.

Students urged other teens to remember that young people can rise above stereotypes and their circumstances.

“Don’t let skin color define who you are,” Christian Morales, one of the youth highlighted in the video, said. “Don’t let where you come from dictate what you’ll be.”

Design Thinking: ‘Seeing Problems as Solutions’

Student leaders then guided participants through a process that can help students overcome life challenges: design thinking.

It’s a buzz word commonly used in Silicon Valley, with myriad definitions and applications. Here’s how Dr. Arlando Smith, co-superintendent of New Haven Unified School District, defined it: “Design thinking is seeing problems as solutions. We need to be creative and innovative to get different results.”

Students walked the audience through the design thinking process with Design Project Zero: A 90-Minute Activity.

Post-Summit Ideas

With guidance and training from the K12 Lab Network at the Stanford d.School, student leaders also took participants through the process of need-finding, understanding, creating, and “thinking with an end result of doing actionable outcomes” designed for Union City by summit participants, community members, and youth.

Groups discussed questions including, “How might we help students shed their academic baggage?” “How might we help students leave their personal responsibilities at the door when they arrive at school?” and “How might we assess and honor improvement?”

Ideas for post-summit work included teaching eighth graders more about high school and college, creating a system to offer a comfortable support environment for youth, using social media to build relationships, and offering bilingual assistance for students and parents.

America’s Promise Alliance is working with community partners across the country to host 100 community summits through 2016. This initiative is part of its GradNation goal to reach a 90 percent on-time high school graduation rate by 2020.

Each community summit convenes multi-sector leaders to identify challenges facing young people in their communities and develop strategies to address them.

To learn more about community summits or find one in your area, visit GradNation community summits.