Ask Allison Sims and Natalie Hubler what the Community Schools grant means for Du Quoin, and they won't start by talking about money. They won't start with budgets or line items or even the word grant. They start with people — the children they've served as social workers for years, the families who trust them even when life is complicated, and the community partners who show up long before anyone asks.

"We're kind of a package deal at this point," Allison says, and Natalie agrees. They finish each other's thoughts. They overlap constantly. And when Diana Rea, their superintendent, brought them the Community Schools grant opportunity, it felt like a natural extension of what they were already doing together. "It was right up our alley as social workers," Allison says.

The five-year, million-dollar-a-year grant focuses on creating stronger connections between the school and the wider community — not by inventing something new, but by listening carefully. The District is in year two of the grant cycle.

Their first year was devoted almost entirely to that listening. The tool was the ANA Survey — an asset and needs assessment given to an extraordinary range of people. Allison surveyed all high school students and every staff member: teachers, paraprofessionals, cooks, custodians. "All inclusive," she says. Natalie's list included elementary students, parents, community members, and partners like the Elks, the Eagles, Farm Fancy, local dentists, Perry County Counseling. Between them, they gathered close to 900 voices.

The questions were simple and honest:
What's working?
Where are we strong?
Where do we need to grow?

Laying it all out there felt vulnerable — asking for feedback you might not always want to hear but absolutely need to hear.

The results affirmed what Allison and Natalie see daily: supportive staff, strong extracurricular and athletic opportunities, a safe climate, community pride, and deep partnerships. But the needs mattered even more: increased mental-health support, stronger attendance support, expanded tutoring, deeper family engagement, better access to basic needs like food, clothing, transportation, and stability.

From those 900 voices, they created an implementation plan. Allison oversees four goals at the high school; Natalie oversees three at the elementary level. Their work overlaps constantly.

And then the stories started emerging.

There was the child a dentist was treating — a little boy who mentioned he gets made fun of sometimes because of his teeth. The dentist told Natalie, "I am just gonna do this all for free. You save your money for another provider who needs it." No discussion. No hesitation. Just compassion.

There was the family Allison and Natalie took to St. Louis for a dental procedure — a little boy who had nine teeth extracted under anesthesia. When they came out, the mother realized she didn't have gauze, pain medicine, or food for afterward. Allison and Natalie stepped in. That moment inspired the Helping Hearts fund, supported by a deeply committed thrift organization in Pinckneyville that donated $1,500 to ensure families never face those gaps alone.

There was the mother registering her child who wasn't willing to ask for help — pride and shame holding her back. "And now we're helping her," Natalie says. Sometimes the hardest step is admitting you need guidance.

There's the birth certificate Natalie is getting from Colorado for a family who can't navigate the bureaucracy alone. There are the gas cards for families driving themselves to appointments. There are the providers who decline payment when Allison and Natalie try to compensate them. "They say, 'We don't want anything,'" Allison recalls. "That's this community."

Throughout the conversation, one theme surfaces again and again: Du Quoin has always had a community-schools heart — even before the grant existed. Allison says it plainly: "There's never been a time where we've had a need for a family that wasn't met by the community." Food. Clothing. Utilities. Transportation. Whatever a family lacked, someone stepped in.

The grant didn't create compassion.

It expanded the reach of it.

"It's refreshing," Allison says. "The word I keep using is refreshing." Instead of responding only in the moment, they can now help families on a macro scale — planning, strengthening systems, building long-term partnerships. "The school is the hub," she says. "The center of the community."

At the elementary level, third and fourth graders asked for more activities in their surveys, so Natalie is using the ideas to reshape after-school programs — such as book clubs for first and second graders. Attendance challenges look different between buildings too. With younger children, it's often not the kids' fault they're not there. So the work has shifted toward partnering with families, creating incentives, making attendance a shared responsibility rather than a point of blame.

The work is practical. It's relational. It's generational. And it carries a simple, guiding question that Community Schools leaders shared in training — one that captured Allison's heart the moment she heard it:

"How are the children?"

If the answer is, "The children are well," then everything else is working.

And in Du Quoin, that's exactly the goal.