Lisa, a freshman at Flambeau High School, rarely came to school. But when she did, there was usually trouble—fistfights, swearing at teachers and other students, storming out of class. And there was trouble when she didn't come to school as well: Lisa was picked up by police more than once, and she had run away from home. Not surprisingly, she was failing all of her classes. Her older sisters, each pregnant by 15, had dropped out of school. Lisa appeared to be following their example.
When I met her, several months into the spring semester, Lisa was introducing residents of Rusk County Nursing Home to a cat called Batchi. An elderly man sitting in a wheelchair was saying, “We used to have nine cats. Yup. They multiplied. How old is your cat, Lisa?”
“She's not even a year,” Lisa responded.
Since that perilous first fall semester, Lisa had gotten into a student service learning program. Her progress that spring was dramatic. For one thing, she was coming to school—regularly. For another, she was making C's, B's, and even A's in her academic courses. No longer an incessant troublemaker, she now was making positive contributions to the community—not only visiting seniors at the nursing home, but also teaching other students about the responsibilities of owning a pet and writing a series of papers on the topic. One story, about a dog whose life she had saved, was published in a local newspaper. Lisa's self-esteem took a U-turn, and her social skills improved rapidly.
The program that helped Lisa is no silver bullet. For every two steps forward, there's been at least one back. The serious issues in Lisa's life have not wholly dissolved, but her progress is clearly attributable to a specific intervention.
The Community as Classroom
The Flambeau School District in Tony, Wisconsin, has made a serious commitment to what the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation refers to as “community education,” or what John Goodlad calls the “educative community.” Goodlad says that the development of the educative community requires mobilization of all present educational institutions and all potentially educative institutions in a common concern for educating all children and youth. In effect, the entire environment must educate, and everyone within this environment must become both educator and learner. This small district in Wisconsin's poorest county consists of five small rural communities, where unemployment runs high. The district, which serves 710 students, has a full-time community education director, Chuck Ericksen, who organizes family-school-community partnerships, projects, and interventions. An important part of this work focuses on at-risk students at the high school level.
Through the district's partnership with Mount Senario College, Ericksen linked Lisa with Sheila Poradish, an intern in social work from the college. One thing that came to light as the intern listened to Lisa's concerns was her passion for animals. When Poradish brought this to Ericksen's attention, an additional community connection was introduced into the intervention. They asked Kathalin Tuisl, an animal welfare educator, to design a student service learning project for Lisa and half a dozen other at-risk students who were concerned about the welfare of animals.
This project is one of a number of ways the school district connects learning to the community and to the world of work. Because jobs are scarce in rural Rusk County, the district has developed a variety of programs that give students workplace experience—everything from spending a day on the job with a professional to a one- or two-year plan to develop a range of job-specific skills. These learning experiences can take place on campus with help from community members. For example, a local printing company helped set up a desktop publishing operation, enabling students to produce school and district newsletters.
Very often, however, the projects take place in the workplace, which becomes a laboratory for academic learning as well as job readiness. A volunteer experience with a charitable organization, for example, can provide students not only experience in the study of civics and social studies, but also opportunities to improve math and language arts skills, scientific understanding, and artistic expression. These experiences help students think, problem solve, communicate, and make contributions in a real-world setting.
In a district program called REAL Enterprises (Rural Entrepreneurship through Action Learning), students research, plan, set up, and operate their own businesses, filling gaps in the local economy. For example, one girl started her own home-based health care service as soon as she turned 18, while still a senior in high school. She acquired home health care certification and training prior to graduation. Other examples of REAL Enterprise projects include developing a business plan for a family farm, learning diesel mechanics, and obtaining milk and cheese testing certification.
Elements of Successful Interventions
- Students work with adult mentors or advisers. As central as the student/teacher relationship is to educational change and development, additional relationships are very often needed—especially in working with at-risk students. In Lisa's case, it was clear that she would continue to spin out of control until positive, caring adults (who were not professionally obligated to teach her) established a relationship with her. This was the indispensable starting point of the intervention.
- Students gain real-world experience. Conventional classroom experiences are largely disconnected from the community and from real-world experience. Algebra and geometry, as taught to me in high school in the 1970s, were abstract, decontextualized, and not made relevant to my experience. I learned enough to kill the requirements and managed to avoid math altogether in postsecondary studies. Only in more recent years—in the course of project budgeting and other real-life problem solving—have I gained insight into why some people actually enjoy mathematics. Whether real-world experiences are simulated in classrooms, as in microsociety schools, or actually take place in the community, workplace, wilderness, and other real-world settings, recontextualizing learning can be a powerful strategy.
- Students make genuine contributions to the community. Given that self-devaluation was at the core of Lisa's problems, it's not surprising that a service learning project would have such a powerful, positive effect. Overcoming a poor self-image becomes easier when you are touching the lives of others. This is a good place to note an important distinction between student volunteer activities and student service learning. While both involve voluntary community service, only the latter combines service with a structure for reflecting on and learning from the experience—for example, by keeping a journal, participating in discussion groups with other volunteers, writing a paper, or making a presentation.
- The projects are individualized to meet the particular needs and priorities of the student. While Lisa and other students benefited from a service learning project on animal welfare, you can be sure that other at-risk students have very different concerns and interests. For example, another high school student's interest in aviation led to a district partnership with the local Experimental Aircraft Association. A dozen or so students and their parents joined the resulting aviation club, which provides exciting opportunities to learn about flying, aircraft mechanics, weather, and more.
The School-Community Connection
The District of Flambeau is one of six schools in the country participating in the School-Community Connection. To join in the project, schools or districts submitted proposals to the Institute for Responsive Education. With funding from the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation and the Plan for Social Excellence, originally seven schools came together in the fall of 1992 for several days of intensive training and strategic planning at the National Center for Community Education in Flint, Michigan.
With community education as a framework, teams from each school—including the principal, a teacher, a parent, a community partner, and a state education agency representative—created action plans designed to tighten the connections between school and community. In some cases, the teams are carrying out plans similar to those conceived at the Flint conference. In other cases, new needs have given rise to new directions.
Since that conference, the Institute for Responsive Education has supported the six schools now participating with small grants and technical assistance, including site visits and ongoing contact by phone and mail. (Brief sketches of four of the six schools and their projects appear in the box above.)
The School-Community Connection
Here's a nutshell description of four projects within the Institute for Responsive Education's School-Community Connection.
Decker Family Development Center is in Barberton, Ohio, a small city on the outskirts of Akron with high unemployment and large concentrations of families on welfare. Decker is a collaborative “one-stop shopping” center for more than 400 families with children from birth to 5 years. A community work experience task force develops job shadowing sites and offers pre-employment classes for parents.
Fairfield Court Elementary School (pre-K–5) in Richmond, Virginia, serves an African-American student body of 525. Near a public housing project, the school is at a considerable distance from many of the services that families and children need. Thus, the action team coordinates health and human services for families.
Saint Rocco School (K–8) in Newark, New Jersey, is in a low-income neighborhood, where 490 children—mostly African American and mostly non-Catholic—attend. The action team holds community- and school-wide discussions to set goals and then works to increase community resources—both financial and human (for example, tutoring and mentoring).
The Valley School (pre-K–12) in Flint, Michigan, serves an economically, racially, and ethnically diverse student body of 170. As the school prepares to move into a building on the campus of the Michigan School for the Deaf, the action team is developing a student service learning component that pairs students from both schools.
The Classroom as Community
If the Flambeau project illustrates how the community and workplace can be invaluable extensions of the classroom, another School-Community Connection project is bringing community partners right into the classroom. Kapunahala Elementary School in Kaneohe, a town on the windward side of the Hawaiian island of Oahu, serves 550 students.
The aspect of community that Kapunahala's School-Community Connection project focuses on is creating and strengthening caring support systems in the classroom, particularly for at-risk students. Like the district in Wisconsin, Kapunahala's project has taken shape within a community education framework, but what is distinctive in Hawaii is the extent to which this is a statewide framework. Hawaii is unique among the 50 states in having a single, unified school district governed by the State Board of Education. The board has led the way in encouraging schools to establish strong family-school-community partnerships through Parent-Community Networking Centers (PCNCs). Facilitators in subdistricts and participating schools work to expand communication and interaction among home, school, and community.
Cynthia Okazaki, Kapunahala's facilitator, has been working with a team of teachers, parents, and administrators at the school to design and implement a community-in-the-classroom project. During the 1993–94 school year, their efforts focused on one 1st, one 2nd, and one 5th grade class. The project expanded in the 1994–95 school year to include kindergarten and 6th grade.
During the first year of the project, Daisy Ishihara's 2nd grade class included a young boy from Koolau Village, a nearby low-income housing project. Ishihara was concerned because Herman needed more attention and support than she alone could provide. Herman wasn't eating enough, and academically he was substantially behind most of his classmates. His frequent refusals to get out of the car, when one of his parents drove him to school, were just one indication of an overall negative attitude toward school. There were reports of Herman wandering the streets late at night, wearing no shirt. Koolau Village is known for its gang activity, and Herman seemed particularly susceptible to gang influence.
With help from other adults, Ishihara was able to create a support network around Herman. These other adults included parents of children who volunteered in the classroom, retired teachers, a full-time educational aide, and local citizens. They made sure that Herman had breakfast even if he was tardy. They provided needed clothing, a food basket at Thanksgiving, one-on-one tutoring, and lots of tender loving care.
This support network extended beyond the classroom. Another piece of Kapunahala's School-Community Connection project involves an after-school tutoring and recreational program at the Koolau Village community center. Through this partnership between Kapunahala's Center and Pali View Baptist Church, Herman received additional tutoring and TLC.
Before long, Herman's punctuality and attendance at school improved. Because people showed care for him, he was able to care about school. During the year Herman moved from dependence on tutorial assistance to a greater ability to read and solve math problems on his own. But most of all, he was a happier kid.
As in Lisa's case, this was no silver-bullet solution to Herman's problems. Over the summer his family was evicted from its housing unit. When Herman didn't turn up at school the next fall, a case worker for the child protective service agency found that the family was living on a beach. Herman's fate is unclear at this time, but it's noteworthy that as a homeless 3rd grader, he still seeks out his teacher from 2nd grade when he needs a hug. If the school were structured to keep students and teachers together for two years, Herman might have benefited even more from “Papa Joe,” a retired carpenter who now comes to Ishihara's class three days a week as a tutor, mentor, and “papa.”
The Path to Partnership
A clear contrast can easily be drawn between the community as classroom (Wisconsin) versus the classroom as community (Hawaii) approach. The Wisconsin model recontextualizes learning—connecting student learning to the real world, and allowing this environment to reshape the what and how of teaching. The Hawaii model, on the other hand, is more concerned with nurturance than with context; it brings the kind of supportive networks that are present in ideal communities to bear on children in the classroom who are most in need of such support. Despite this basic distinction, neither model is feasible without collaboration between the school and community (including local businesses, agencies, institutions, families, and other citizens).
Partnership, we are learning, is something more than the words parent involvement or community involvement convey. Involving a parent in a one-time event—chaperoning a field trip or attending a performance—might be an early stepping-stone on the path to partnership. But true partnership indicates a sustained relationship involving mutual expectations, responsibilities, and benefits. It evolves out of the recognition that most of our children will not reach their potential if educators and educative institutions work in isolation. But as the village comes together around its children, we can see the future taking shape before our eyes.
