Going to Scale with School-Community Collaborations

School Administrator, Nov, 1996 by Larry F. Guthrie

Expanding Pilot Programs Districtwide Requires Capacity Building and skill Development

The dramatic increase in numbers of school-community collaborations that coordinate education, social services, health care, and other services to support needy children and families has touched nearly every community over recent years.

These new arrangements emphasize prevention over crisis intervention, comprehensive collaboration over single-issue categorical programs, family focus over individual treatment, and flexibility over rigid bureaucracy. Even the names of some programs reflect the spirit and purpose behind the movement: Caring Communities, Even Start, Healthy Start, New Beginnings, and New Futures.

Typically school-community collaborations lead to the creation of family centers at or near a school, where assistance to disadvantaged students and families ranges from transportation or tutoring to long-term family counseling. Collaborating agencies work out kinks in policies and agreements, reducing the fragmentation, overlap, and gaps in services to children and families in order to improve their educational, health, and social outcomes.

If your school district has a school-community collaborative--and chances are it does given the recent explosion in such efforts--it likely was set up as a demonstration, pilot, or one-of-a-kind effort. Probably there's an implicit assumption that, if the project is successful, the same personalized, comprehensive services will be extended to children and families served by other schools in the district.

Demonstrations, however, usually depend on an infusion of additional resources to get off the ground: extra money, time for planning, and staff development. Initially, they also may involve special staffing, redeployment of partner agency staff, and special agreements with agencies. How can you extend the family center approach used in the demonstration at one school to several? How do you make the special case part of the mainstream--or in the parlance of school reformers, how do you "go to scale?"

Scaling Defined

Scale is a relative term. In one sense, scale refers to implementation within a geopolitical unit--a school district, city, county, or state. A second aspect of scale is the proportion of the population to be included. As Charles Bruner, director of the Center for Child and Family Studies in Des Moines, Iowa, points out in his background paper on this subject for a 1993 Wingspread Conference sponsored by the National Center for Services Integration, being at scale also means providing services to all those eligible.

Third, going to scale means implementing an innovation at a system level, where key institutional and political barriers and issues are present. School-community collaborations are designed to fill gaps and reduce fragmentation in the system of services for children, and as the program matures, a ripple effect inevitably will lead to barriers associated with state, local, and federal regulations and policies.

Despite efforts to disseminate and extend educational and social innovations across the country, going to scale is something we still know little about. For one thing, the task is much more difficult than that of extending innovations within a single school or classroom. No blueprints exist and little systematic investigation is taking place into what it takes to scale up an innovation.

Nonetheless, interest in the issue of scaling up has increased in the last several years, and we're beginning to learn more about how to spread school-community collaborations and make them stick. Evidence of this interest can be detected well beyond school circles. Discussions such as those at the Wingspread Conference suggest state and local policymakers are intrigued with the idea.

More important is the fact that several locations are attempting to scale up existing school-community partnerships. St. Louis's Caring Communities program is being expanded statewide through seven community partnerships orchestrated by the Family Investment Trust, a public/private partnership set up in 1993. The effort already has spawned 64 Caring Community sites in Missouri serving an estimated student population of 22,000.

In Los Angeles, 16 schools received grants in the last few years through California's Healthy Start, an ongoing statewide initiative to spread school-linked services. The school district set out to expand the services available to children and families through high school, middle school, and elementary clusters. These services are offered at a family center located at a high school within each cluster. The collaboration started in 17 clusters in 1995-96 and will move to 10 more this year.

Because of the experiences in these and other places, we are coming to know more about what scaling up is--and what it is not. How to get there remains the challenge.

Common Features

Going to scale is not a matter of replication, cookie-cutter style. Nor is it a mandated, top-down process. Instead, scaling up has to do with developing the context and tools for change. It demands capacity building and continued support for change. Until key players--teachers, social workers, nurse practitioners, administrators, and community members--are ready and until they have the skills and understand that going to scale will require entirely new approaches, there's little chance the collaboration will take hold.