Education
BEYOND THE BELL | MAKING THE HOME-SCHOOL CONNECTION
Nurtured neighborhood blossoms
School uses community connections to put focus on children and families
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About this series
Education reporter Erin Richards spent 10 months researching teaching and parent involvement issues, including what works around the country. The effort included a $3,500 fellowship from the New York-based Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media and the Chicago-based Joyce Foundation. Neither organization had any editorial control over the final content.
The Series
PART 1: Research shows parental engagement brings results, but efforts - including in Milwaukee Public Schools - have lagged.
PART 2: Many teachers want to work better with parents, but say they receive little guidance or training.
PART 3: Teachers in some schools and districts are experimenting with home visits to connect with families.
PART 4: Through partnerships, some schools bring the community inside their doors.
Research Shelf
Here's a look at research on community schools:
- Organizing is important:A six-year study sponsored by the Annenberg Institute for School Reform found that effective community organizing at the grass-roots level contributed to higher educational outcomes for students and greater parent engagement.
- Benefits for districts in poor areas: A study that looked at the effects of chronic early absenteeism for youngsters in New York City schools found that students in high-poverty districts benefited from relationships with community-based organizations that provided outreach to parents.
- Gains found in most schools: An evaluation of community school programs around the country found that 36 of 49 reported academic gains, especially in reading and math, though in some cases these were for special populations of students.
In His Own Words
Marty Blank is the president of the Institute for Educational Leadership and the director of the Coalition of Community Schools in Washington, D.C.
Why should schools and districts explore the community school model?
Research shows that there are a variety of non-school factors that affect student achievement, such as asthma rates, the amount of time kids spend watching television, lead-based paint exposure, early chronic absenteeism.
A second dimension is that students themselves are not engaged in school, especially by the high school years.
Community schools try to leverage local resources and support to not only enrich students and provide social support, but to help them continue learning in the real world after they get out of school.
Why are we hearing more about these schools lately?
The new administration, including (Education Secretary) Arne Duncan, who worked on these schools in Chicago, is supportive of the concept.
The challenge is to translate what it means to be engaged in your community by engaging with your local school. How do you turn a space into a community garden and connect it to the curriculum?
What's it going to take to turn around a large number of schools? How does the local leadership or state policy or federal policy create an incentive for people to work together toward a common set of results?
What cities are setting an example for how to implement community schools in a more systematic manner?
New York has a chain of community schools that are overseen by the Children's Aid Society, and Chicago has 150. Portland, Ore., has 54, and Cincinnati has gotten a lot of attention for a systematic approach to establishing community schools in the district.
What would it take to make this happen in Milwaukee?
For a principal, I would ask them: Who are the players in your building and what are they currently doing?
Talk about the factors you see influencing student achievement. Talk to your partners about what they see in the school. Then you have to figure out who can coordinate all the stuff you want to get done.
To the community, I'd say, who is likely to see this approach as something that they want to move on? It could be a superintendent; it could be a United Way leader, a philanthropist, or a member of the School Board.
What's crucial is for those leaders to say we need to get our community behind our biggest goal: educating all our kids.
Last of four parts
Lynn, Mass. — Principal Claire Crane can look out the window of her school on the outskirts of Boston, point to each house and tell you the issues inside: drug abuse, poverty, foreclosure, immigration.
The knowledge comes from the relationship Crane has with students and parents at the once-failing Robert L. Ford School, relationships that developed and thrived once the school became as focused on serving parents as on serving children.
As a "full-service" or "community school," Ford opens early and closes late, maintains partnerships with outside agencies to provide its families with social support and enrichment services, and serves as a community center for the neighborhood.
"We started by doing a questionnaire to see what parents wanted - more than half of them didn't have a high school diploma," Crane said. "The top three things they wanted were education, day care and a clean and safe neighborhood. Nobody had ever asked them that before."
Community schools have long had a foothold in Chicago and New York and are growing in cities such as St. Paul, Minn., St. Louis and Cincinnati. At a time when much of the discussion about education reform has emphasized parental involvement, the model could hold lessons for schools in Milwaukee that have struggled for years to connect with urban parents.
"A lot of parents may not have had great experiences themselves when they were in school, but we can draw them in by connecting them with services they need," said Joan Devlin, a top official with the American Federation of Teachers, a national teachers union that has been advocating for community schools.
Devlin added that as a result of helping parents, schools can relieve children of some of the non-academic baggage that's making it hard for them to learn.
Although community schools vary by design and intensity, their hallmarks include partnerships with outside agencies and some kind of coordinator who braids together the resources and matches them up with curriculum goals.
In Milwaukee, the concept is at work at Bruce-Guadalupe Community School, a kindergarten-eighth grade charter school operated by the United Community Center, and at Longfellow Elementary School, a traditional kindergarten-eighth grade school that partners with neighborhood nonprofit Journey House. Longfellow will be building an addition to be used by both the agency and the school.
Like Crane's school, the two Milwaukee schools exemplify how strong leaders can single-handedly change much of their structural design to encourage better family and community relationships.
Ford School turns around
On a typical day, Crane, 71, drives up the narrow streets of Lynn and arrives at the three-story brick school at 6:45 a.m.
Kids tend to get into trouble before and after school if their parents are working, so Crane prefers to supervise them at school rather than let them wander the streets.
Although Ford has always been a neighborhood school, parents used to wait warily on the other side of the fence while their kids walked inside. So Crane cleared a room and started offering free coffee to anyone who came in the door.
The school is old, with high ceilings and narrow hallways and one wooden-floored gymnasium that also serves as the cafeteria and auditorium. But what's most noticeable is the atmosphere: There are a lot of visitors in the building every day, talking to Crane and teachers, working with students, volunteering.
After school, an outside agency works with underperforming students on math and literacy and leads other activities until a 4:30 p.m. dinner served in the gym. Crane encourages Saturday school for chronic underachievers.
"They love it," Crane said. "All their friends are there."
A former school counselor and social worker, Crane took over Ford School in 1989. At that time, it was the lowest-achieving school in the city. Daily attendance ranged from 75% to 85%. Meanwhile, only between 10% and 20% of parents showed up at parent-teacher conferences. Each year, a third of the faculty turned over.
"I said we had to start with the family, because a family that learns together and gains together, stays together," Crane said.
In Lynn, that would take a heroic effort. Located 10 miles from Boston, the city has a population of about 87,000 and used to be a thriving factory town.
Now, the city is plagued by poverty and populated with a high number of new immigrants, many of whom cannot speak English. More than 90% of Ford students receive free- and reduced-price lunches, a common measurement of poverty. Some 86% are children of color.
Rates of child abuse and neglect outpace the nation; Ford teachers don't walk to their cars alone at night. Three murders have occurred near the school in the past year.
On the first day as principal at Ford, Crane watched as a boy rode his bicycle down the school hallway.
Wasting no time, Crane pulled out teachers who were serious about making changes and had them help her devise a new discipline plan. Teachers who didn't want to participate transferred to other schools in the system.
Then, Crane issued the survey to all the parents. The top needs: more education for themselves, day care for their kids, clean and safe neighborhoods for everybody.
Crane tackled the first by offering free night school for adults on Monday and Tuesday from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m., with free care for their children. She uses a large chunk of the extra federal money Ford gets for being a low-income school - it totals around $300,000 per year - for that purpose.
To address neighborhood concerns, Crane developed a partnership with a local citizens group and allowed it to meet at the school regularly. In exchange, members raised money to start an organic garden, right on the blacktop surrounding Ford, in raised boxes.
For day care after school, Crane and parents chose an after-school program operator that keeps the kids at school working on academics and activities up and through dinnertime. Parents pay to participate on a sliding scale, supported by local government sources of funding.
Additionally, Crane has won school grants through NASA, she pays for kids to get vision screenings and glasses, and she's known for letting local immigrants apply to be aides in the youngest classrooms. The aides are unpaid, but they soak up lessons along with the children while providing an extra set of hands to help the teacher.
Recently, a woman who wanted to lead a charm school class for the girls at Ford was OK'd by Crane, as long as she agreed to do an etiquette class for the boys, too.
"They are not getting much of that at home," Crane said.
Today, Ford's state test scores are on par with the rest of Lynn Public Schools, and higher in some subjects. The school has one of the lowest special education referral rates in the city, and daily student attendance is 91%.
Attendance at parent-teacher conferences has jumped from between 10% and 20% to between 90% and 95%.
Focus on neighborhood
On paper, community schools seem sensible. But putting them into practice can be complicated.
In Milwaukee, for instance, community schools could be stymied by what MPS sees as a strength - parents' ability to choose almost any school in the system for their child.
In 2008-'09, less than 25% of parents sent their children to the school in their attendance zone. Some even elect to bus their children across town to a lower-performing building.
In Lynn, the model has worked because the school focuses on helping the neighbors, and neighbors focus on helping the school.
"All schools should be working on what their communities need," said Maria Carrasco, a Lynn School Board member, Ford School grandparent, and member of the Highlands Coalition, a group of neighbors that meets at Ford regularly to address local issues.
"We do have fights, but you don't see violence here like in other schools," she said. "And we are a violent city."
Leadership and funding are also vital. Community schools generally have a strong school leader and a full- or part-time organizer who maintains the relationships between schools and the outside agencies.
Low-income schools that receive extra money from the federal government would have to reshuffle their priorities: Do you let go of a reading specialist to implement some other program that may help parents or families?
That's a yes, if you ask Crane. Knowing parents, their issues and how to help them can go a long way toward breaking down barriers to student achievement.
Crane said the first three years of becoming a community school were a nightmare, but that the process got easier with time.
"After you get one or two grants or partnerships going, others become easier to get," she said. "Start slow, start small and it will build itself for you."
About Erin Richards
Erin Richards covers K-12 education in urban and suburban Milwaukee, as well as state politics related to education issues.
