Higher Ground’s General Operating Systems (GOS), with its sets of Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) guide the development, implementation, and sustainability of practices that make up our technical assistance program.  Higher Ground GOS supports process management systems that create better outcomes for students.  Over our 20-year tenure our GOS has helped over fifteen low performing schools in Oakland, CA improve outcomes for at-risk BIPOC youth.  SOP’s provide specific step by step instructions that help parents, teachers, school site leadership, and districts build community practices that help define and meet outcomes.  Our experience makes us especially qualified to help develop community school design teams.  Higher Ground’s technical assistance training core is made up of a team of youth developers whose training was designed to help school administrators usher in ways to integrate community schooling practices into school wide systems, culture, and climate.  

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Infrastructure planning, maintenance, and upgrade all have SOP’s that guide systems change efforts. Assessment, planning, and improvement roadmaps can be created with ease using Higher Ground GOS. Best practice strategies around helping classroom teachers integrate youth development practices into the delivery of curriculum help schools meet academic outcomes.  SOP’s that chaperone the implementation of step by step procedures that transform teaching and/or leadership practices that do not assist in the meeting of stated outcomes help systems change.

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Higher Ground’s technical assistance training core comes with a combined thirty years of youth development experience with best practice strategies for maneuvering underfunded, low performing, public schools toward better outcomes for children and families.  Higher Ground’s Training core has extensive knowledge in the areas of community school formation and sustainability.  School climate and culture development and maintenance is another area of expertise.  Higher Ground’s training core understands how to help systems, schools, and groups integrate restorative justice principles and practices into school climate systems and how to set up continuous quality improvement infrastructures and maintenance systems. Higher Ground’s SOP’s steer training, coaching, and appraisal cycles of inquiry and SOP’s expose school leaders to various human and fiscal sustainability models. Using a Harlem Children’s zone model for community school development Higher Ground shows schools how to use community-based partnership cultivation and maintenance to drive innovation,

 

Higher Ground is a powerhouse of knowledge and experience.