Partnering Full-Service Community Schools: Creating New Institutions

Community agencies can become partners with schools to help overcome barriers to learning, Ms. Dryfoos notes. Many people see the school site as the potential hub of education and services in the community. Parents want their children to be in safe places after school, and they welcome the personal assistance with child rearing that they can get in school-based family and health centers. Thus community schools offer an excellent alternative to traditional schools for students, families, teachers, and service providers. FULL-SERVICE community schools are proliferating in many different forms. Schoolpeople, child advocates, youth workers, and university faculty members are putting their heads together and coming up with designs for new types of school/community institutions that directly address the problems in contemporary life that create barriers to learning. The operating principles are simple. Children cannot learn unless their basic needs are met; support services for children and families will have little impact unless cognitive development is taken care of. Programs that incorporate high-quality education and support services are arising independently from various endeavors at the local, state, and national levels. They are known by many names: Beacons, Bridges to Success, Caring Communities, University-Assisted Schools, Communities in School, COZI (Comer/Zigler), Schools That Never Close, or just plain Community Schools. No two are exactly alike, but all share many similar characteristics. The sum of these efforts is impressive. We do not know exactly how many full-service community schools have been developed, but surely the number is well over a thousand. What is most remarkable about these initiatives is that they seem to fall outside the domain of school reform and are rarely referenced in the school reform literature. Yet community schools are committed to school transformations that lead to improved academic achievement along with other goals related to youth development and family and community well-being. This should not be taken to mean that educators are not interested. Indeed, the recently formed Coalition for Community Schools includes all the major national educational organizations among its 170 partners.1 Nevertheless, I believe that many Kappan readers might be unfamiliar with these developments. Therefore, I will summarize what is going on, why it is happening now, what difference it is making, what has been the experience with replication and sustainability to date, and what to expect in the future. Definition What is a full-service community school? The Coalition for Community Schools labored long and hard to come up with a satisfactory definition. The vision the group arrived at includes a number of features. A community school, operating in a public school building, is open to students, families, and the community before, during, and after school, seven days a week, all year long. It is jointly operated and financed through a partnership between the school system and one or more community agencies. Families, young people, principals, teachers, youth workers, neighborhood residents, college faculty members, college students, and businesspeople all work together to design and implement a plan for transforming the school into a child-centered institution. Oriented toward the community, a community school encourages student learning through community service and service learning. A before- and after-school learning component encourages students to build on their classroom experiences, to expand their horizons, to explore their cultural heritage, to engage in sports and recreation, and just to have fun. A family support center helps families with child rearing, employment, housing, and other services. Medical, dental, and mental health services are also available on site. A full-time community school coordinator, working alongside the school principal, oversees the delivery of an array of support services provided by local agency partners and participates on the school management team. …