Abstract
Community schools have recently (re)emerged in the United States as a vital, comprehensive strategy for addressing poverty-related barriers to children’s school learning. However, not all low-income school communities are endowed with the resources needed to launch a comprehensive array of school-based/linked services and programs. In this article, the authors describe a place-based model for school improvement for low-income school communities where formal and fiscal resources are in short-supply. Framed by two best-practice interventions from the youth development and family support literatures, the authors identify five “high leverage” improvement mechanisms that social workers, educators, and parents can collaboratively target to affect change. These improvement mechanisms, together with the interventions they implicate, can help community school efforts provide a more powerful, engagement-focused reach into students’ peer, family, and community ecologies.
Highlights
How should schools serving large numbers of low-income children go about engaging their parents? What out-of-school-time resources and supports are needed to support the social, educational, and learning needs of low-income children and the schools that serve them? How might educators, social workers, and parents work together to address poverty-related barriers to children’s school learning and overall healthy development? How might they combat social isolation and exclusion dynamics at school and in the community?
This Special Issue on place-based partnerships and new school designs offers several complex and compelling models for addressing these important questions. These models range from well-established efforts to implement comprehensive and integrative school-based learning support programs in the United States [1] to more broad, ecologically-driven and systems-oriented efforts in the UK that connect the work of schools and community agencies to policy makers and other networked government arrangements [2]
Social capital resources in service of collective efficacy become functional when individuals and entire families draw on them. It is this transition—from structural to functional social capital—that we aimed to develop through our approach to place-based and university-assisted school-community improvement
Summary
Our programmatic response to this paradoxical challenge is to engage social workers, educators, university students and faculty, as well as community parents in the co-design of activities aimed to enhance the peer, family, and community ecologies of elementary school students (grades K-6) We pursue this particular model and approach with due recognition that solving problems like poverty and its correlates requires much more than an isolated series of school-based programs and services; they demand a comprehensive and coordinated policy response [1,3]. Until such time that policy supports and conditions present themselves throughout the United States and elsewhere, children, youth, families, schools, communities, and the professionals that serve them need a place to start. We conclude with select implications for policy makers, university-assisted community schools, as well as related school-community collaborations
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