School-Community Partnering - model programs in New York City and other locales

School Administrator, August, 2001 by Priscilla Pardini

Turf struggles can be overcome to provide a full array of services to students and families

When Jorge Izquierdo was named acting superintendent of New York City's Community School District 6 late last fall, he took on a big challenge: running 27 schools in the city's Washington Heights neighborhood. The area, which includes northern Manhattan and Harlem, serves mostly low-income, immigrant families. Yet Izquierdo soon realized that at five of those schools he had a lot of help.

From early in the morning until late at night, six days a week and 12 months a year, students and their families could count on the schools for medical and dental care, mental health counseling, immigration advice, food and housing assistance and legal aid. Parents could sign their children up for before- and afterschool activities, summer day camps and early childhood programs. They could enroll themselves in a wide range of adult education classes.

"I have to say, I was really impressed," Izquierdo says. "I wished I had had all those services at my school when I was a principal."

In all, nine such schools--known as community schools--operate in New York City under a partnership between the New York City Board of Education and the Children's Aid Society. Jane Quinn, assistant executive director for Community Schools at the Children's Aid Society, says the goal of the partnership was twofold: to remove barriers that keep students from learning and to provide the kind of educational and cultural enrichment activities often lacking in schools located in impoverished neighborhoods. "We're there to supplement the school's core instructional program, and to bring human and financial resources to the table as a long-term, committed partner," Quinn says.

For Izquierdo's five schools that commitment has meant an investment of roughly $50 million over the last 10 years. Researchers at New York City's Fordham University, who have spent the last six years studying two community schools in Washington Heights, say it is paying off. Student attendance and academic achievement are higher and suspension rates lower than at comparable New York City schools. In addition, parents say they feel comfortable in their children's schools. As a result, they are more involved in their children's education.

To Izquierdo, the reason is obvious. "You can talk about raising test scores all you want, but until you do something concrete to meet children's most basic needs, you can't begin to deal with instructional issues."

A Daunting Task

To be sure, the Washington Heights community school model, one of the most comprehensive in the country, was designed as a prototype to demonstrate virtually everything community schooling has to offer. In addition, the Children's Aid Society, an organization with a long and proven track record in the area of child and family welfare, affords Community School District 6 a level of support unlikely to be matched by many other agencies.

Yet even experts in the field of community schooling say the job of putting such programs together is daunting. "These multifaceted projects are very complicated and can be hard to manage," says Stan Wellborn, director of external affairs at the Annie E. Casey Foundation in Baltimore.

Through its Making Connections initiative, the foundation is building connections at the neighborhood level between schools, churches and health care agencies in 22 communities around the country. Helping guide the project are a series of lessons learned from the foundation's New Futures program, which in the late 1980s underwrote collaborative projects aimed at integrating education, employment, health and human services. According to Wellborn, most projects failed to accomplish their goals, and only the one in Little Rock, Ark., exists today.

"One thing we learned is that these efforts take a lot of upfront planning and a lot more oversight and direction than we realized," Wellborn says.

A 1995 evaluation of the program says, "True integration at the service-delivery level ... requires unprecedented commitments by school boards, child welfare agencies, and other youth-serving institutions to subordinate their traditional authority over critical functions including budgeting, staffing and resource allocation in favor of collective decision making."

Growing Movement

Yet despite such cautions, the number of school-community partnerships nationwide is soaring as school leaders capitalize on the potential benefits that can be gleaned from bringing schools, parents and community agencies together to help students learn. Their goal: to develop "community," "full-service" or "extended-service" schools that deliver not only educational excellence, but also a menu of social services tailored to the needs of individual communities.

"Nothing substitutes for what happens in the classroom," says Marty Blank, staff director of the Coalition for Community Schools, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group that promotes community education. "But more and more school districts are realizing that outside partners can help create conditions in schools that make them more conducive to learning."