Ireland’s Minister for Education Norma Foley toured Dorchester’s John Winthrop Elementary School last week to learn more about a Boston College program that supports teachers and students at the school and is now working with 10 schools in Dublin.

“I’m in awe of the work you’re doing,” Foley told the Winthrop staff and their partners from BC’s City Connects program as they described how the evidence-based program helps provide a range of services to the school’s more than 200 students.

In Boston, City Connects works with the Winthrop and seven other BPS schools. City Connects coordinators, like the Winthrop’s Nicole Marques, work with principals, teachers, and counselors to assess students’ strengths and needs and help provide supports – ranging from tutoring, to afterschool programs, to clothing, meals, and health services – in order to reduce the barriers to improved academic achievement.

Sitting in the school’s temporary library, Foley heard from Winthrop Principal Leah Blake McKetty, who started her job 10 years ago when the Winthrop was a “turnaround” school with test results in the lowest one percentile of Massachusetts schools. A decade later, the Winthrop has climbed to the 14th percentile, though McKetty says there is more work to do.

City Connects “has been an amazing resource for us,” McKetty said. “It’s been integral to helping our students, helping our families, helping our teachers, at all levels and really just supporting not just our students but our overall school community and making sure kids are safe, healthy, fed, clothed and also those other layers of helping our students make those academic gains.”

So far this school year, City Connects has helped the Winthrop deliver 1,484 services to students and families. All told, City Connects serves 45,000 students annually in 139 public, charter, and Catholic schools in Massachusetts and six other states.

In Dublin, City Connects began work two years ago with 10 schools in Dublin’s North East Inner City initiative, which are among schools served by Ireland’s pioneering Delivering Equality of Opportunity in Schools (DEIS), which provides additional services and resources to struggling schools. Partnering with Mary Immaculate College, in Limerick, City Connects has worked during the pandemic to initiate its program in alignment with Irish educational regulations.

In the current year, City Connects has provided 4,777 services and enrichment opportunities to 1,800 students in Dublin, according to Tracie Tobin, a Limerick-based teacher and principal who is leading the implementation of City Connects in Ireland through her work with Mary Immaculate College. Tobin called the City Connects approach “invaluable” to principals and teachers in the Dublin schools the program partners with.

“In the 18 months that City Connects has been on the ground in Dublin, it has become successfully embedded in both schools and community organizations,” said City Connects founder and director Mary Walsh, the Daniel E. Kearns Professor in Urban Education and Innovative Leadership at BC’s Lynch School of Education and Human Development. “This is a testament not only to the program, but to our outstanding partners in Ireland.”

In February, through an anonymous $10 million gift, the BC center that operates City Connects was renamed the Mary E. Walsh Center for Thriving Children in honor of Walsh’s ground-breaking work.

Foley was named Minister of Education in 2020. The same year, she was elected to the lower house of Ireland’s parliament, or Dail, representing constituents in the city of Tralee, Co. Kerry.