Bellwether is celebrating its 15th anniversary this year. We’re using this moment to look back on some of the work we’re most proud of — work that we plan on scaling as new trends and challenges emerge.
Over the last 15 years, our team of experts has partnered with hundreds of organizations who work tirelessly to improve the lives of young people at all ages, from early childhood to postsecondary to career pathways and beyond. Getting to witness the impact they have on students across the country is one of the most rewarding aspects of our work, so we wanted to share those accomplishments more widely. We asked three of our enduring partners how they’ve expanded their organization’s impact over the course of our work together and what they’re especially proud of today.
For our final installment, we’re featuring leaders from Chicago Public Schools (CPS), the fourth-largest public school district in the country. Since 2021, we’ve partnered with CPS’ Office of College and Career Success (OCCS), which promotes social and economic mobility among CPS students by building systems and providing support to increase the number of CPS graduates who earn postsecondary credentials and enter into fulfilling, family-sustaining careers. Bellwether offers strategic guidance as OCCS prepares some of the district’s more than 300,000 students for college and careers.
Recently, we spoke with Megan Hougard, chief of OCCS; Maria Bucio, executive director of Early College and Career Education; and Heidi Truax, executive director of the Office of School Counseling and Postsecondary Advising to learn how their departments are helping more CPS students discover and navigate their postgraduate possibilities.
Megan Hougard, CPS Office of College and Career Success
“Leading innovation at scale for over 300,000 students and 600 schools requires thought partnership at scale. Bellwether was able to support our internal planning and bring unique perspectives from districts across the country. CPS is outpacing the country for postsecondary success and our students are just getting started!”
Maria Bucio, CPS Early College and Career Education
“When I came into this role, [Early College and Career Education] was in a period of transition, and teams were managing their work independently. One of the first priorities was bringing everyone together to build shared understanding and a unified direction for our work.
One of our early opportunities was to bring leaders together to align around shared goals and approaches. With Bellwether’s support, we deepened collaboration across teams, clarified how our work connects, and built a stronger collective focus. Now, our department is having rich conversations about theories of action, resource allocation, and how we can best support the trusted staff who serve our students. Bellwether’s partnership helped us strengthen this alignment and momentum.
Today, we have many more opportunities for students who are looking for noncollege options. We’ve navigated relationships with postsecondary partners like trade schools, trade unions, and military branches. We’ve worked extremely hard in the last year to become authorized for Illinois’ College and Career Pathways Endorsements, and now are able to grant seven endorsement areas in 18 programs — meaning that CPS students can walk away with not just a high school diploma, but also postsecondary credentials and even an associate degree. We now have high school students who graduate with jobs lined up as plumbers after interviewing with union contractors at our open houses. I love attending the celebrations for our graduates, where parents come with flowers and balloons. It’s amazing to see a young person excited to enter a career they’re passionate about.”
Heidi Truax, CPS Office of School Counseling and Postsecondary Advising
“Working with Bellwether helped our team situate ourselves within the national landscape. They helped us understand where we were shining above the rest, where we were lagging, and where we could learn from others in the field. Bellwether started by helping us create our advising framework: We took something that mostly existed in people’s minds and codified it into a framework that’s now used for districtwide training. They also helped us with more concrete data delivery and high-level talking points, which increased buy-in from leaders and philanthropists who wanted to understand more about the work we can do.
Bellwether also helped us research the most popular colleges and universities that our students attend and focus on identifying practices that successfully enroll and retain them. This led to an innovative project called the College Compact Promising Practices Innovation Fund, a three-way partnership funded by a philanthropic partner that gives higher education institutions funding to commit to using these practices that work for CPS students. This sort of model — where a school district partners with a philanthropic partner and higher education institutions to do collaborative work that gets sponsored — is unprecedented, and it has had real-life implications on our students.
I’m extremely proud of the advising progress we’ve made. Our pilot year of our postsecondary advising and planning cohort was only for 15 high schools in the district; the following year, we scaled up to 87 high schools. Each school that has participated now has a concrete and comprehensive advising plan from the beginning to the end of high school — across all pathways, not just higher ed. I think this will continue to transform the success of CPS students for years to come.”
To learn more about our work, get in touch at contactus@bellwether.org.
