Building school community relationships: The role of higher education

Abstract

THIS PAPER is an outgrowth of a 1996 study conducted through the National School Network, which includes organizations and schools that are pioneers in integrating the Internet into the curriculum. In the course of our research, we found that community groups are more likely to make the investment required to build a local information infrastructure and support school restructuring when they are able to understand and participate in the educational benefits from that infrastructure. As organizations that function within the local community, schools, as well as teachers, administrators, students, and parents are affected by the local environment—its values, norms, political structures, and economy. As centers of learning, schools also influence their local communities. Our findings indicated that by forming different kinds of partnerships including ones with higher education, the school can enrich its curriculum, and the community can grow to understand, accept, and benefit from the networking technology and the changes in the school. This paper describes two case studies taken from National School Network (NSN) members which involve higher education to help build successful school—community involvement.