While growing up in Alabama, Adam Powell’s father worked as a state trooper and his mother was a social worker. Throughout it all, his parents led by example.
“One of the things that have been embedded in me my entire life has been this idea of service and commitment to the community and others,” Powell says. “My entire childhood was really about commitment to service.”
Powell began his career a case worker with Arlington Life Shelter after earning a master’s in social work at The University of Texas at Arlington. He eventually landed with Education is Freedom in 2007, working his way up to COO and setting the stage for growth in the education nonprofit space.
Today, he is president and CEO of Communities in Schools of the Dallas Region, a position he stepped into in 2019. The nonprofit he leads works with 11 Dallas area school districts to address academics, attendance, social services, behavior, and mental health.
Since taking over at CIS Dallas Region, which was founded in 1985, Powell has seen the organization raise its annual budget from roughly $4.5 million to over $11 million.
“I think people are unaware of just how many mental health challenges exist within our student population and how profoundly that impacts their academic abilities,” he says. “Pre-pandemic, many students were struggling with anxiety and depression. Those are more prevalent in young people than people realize, so part of our work is to mitigate that. We have a team of licensed clinicians that are deployed to our campuses working directly with students.”
According to Powell, roughly 25 percent of the organization’s students battled some form of mental health challenge before the pandemic. Now, that number stands at more than half—and only within the last year or two are the impacts of nontraditional learning coming into focus.
CIS Dallas currently serves 130 campuses, including a charter school, encompassing around 10,000 students from kindergarten through 12th grade. Beyond that, the nonprofit has seen 83 percent of those students they accommodate in any given year improve in academics, behavior, or attendance.
“It speaks a lot to the work we’re doing,” Powell says of the results. “I always remind people these students come to us because they already have a challenge. To be able to take students that are failing classes, are truant, or are dealing with some mental behavior or health challenge, and say more than 80 percent of them improved, speaks to the on-campus work our staff is doing.”
Of the four key pillars CIS Dallas focuses on, Powell says the one that stands out and has a major impact but still needs the most attention is attendance. “With poverty being as pronounced as it is, inflation, and all the economic challenges that exist, many of our students are having to make incredibly hard decisions,” he explains.
“‘Do I go to school and make this long-term investment in myself and my family, or do I go to work because we have bills to pay today?’ There’s so much nuance around the attendance struggle; we’ve always painted the picture that these kids are bad,” Powell says. “But they have to make tradeoffs about whether to care for little brother or sister because they need more money coming into the house to get some basic needs.”
One roundabout way Powell and his team have been able to address the truancy issue has been its annual holiday drive, which is underway and runs through Dec. 16. Typical items are collected—including coats, socks, hats, gloves, and blankets—but hygiene supplies and non-perishable foods are also accepted. More information is here; and the organization’s Amazon wish list is here.
“You go to campuses in early December and see kids wearing shorts and t-shirts,” Powell says. “For so many of these families struggling to put food on the table, some items are luxury items. The coat drive directly responded to what we were seeing across several campuses. The overarching theme is to help close that basic need gap.”
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