Jeff Bryant writes in The Progressive about the success of community schools in building trust between schools and parents. Rightwing activists and politicians have made an issue of the gulf between schools and parents and stirred up angry parents to demand “control” over what is taught.
He begins:
Leslie Hu remembers the very day, a Thursday in March 2020, when her school, Dr. Martin Luther King Academic Middle School in San Francisco, received word from the district office that Friday would be the last day the school would be physically open until further notice due to the coronavirus epidemic. Without waiting for guidance, she and a few other staff members, “immediately went into overdrive to connect with as many families as possible,” she tells me.
Working late into the evening, the staff members made “wellness calls” to deliver messages of care and reassurance. “Our message was, ‘We are not abandoning you. What do you need? We still care,’ ” recallsHu, a community schools coordinator and social worker at the school.
The next day, they enlarged the circle of callers to other school staff members. By the following Wednesday, their wellness calls had reached nearly all of the 460 families with children at the school.
Their efforts yielded critical information about how families were affected by the pandemic and what kinds of challenges they faced.
The outreach effort then expanded to more in-depth interview calls to stay connected to families handling the emergency. Within a month, they had reached out to every family.
Their efforts yielded critical information about how families were affected by the pandemic and what kinds of challenges they faced—such as, whether a breadwinner had lost a job, whether the household had access to the Internet, or whether the family was facing an eviction notice. They also conveyed critical information to help families navigate the crisis, including how to pick up Wi-Fi hotspots and devices from the district, where there were open food pantries, and which local nonprofit organizations and community agencies were providing support for dealing with financial and mental health issues.
“We knew there would be certain things our families probably needed,” Hu recalls. “But we didn’t make assumptions. We knew to ask open-ended questions.”
This outreach effort was so successful that, according to an article by the California Federation of Teachers, the San Francisco Board of Education used it as a model to create a districtwide plan to establishpermanent “coordinated care teams” for reaching out to families and checking on their well-being.
Looking back, Hu describes their response as something that came about intuitively. She and her colleagues didn’t wait for directives from higher-ups. Instead, they relied on a well-practiced behavior of “co-creating,” as she put it, with colleagues in a school where leadership responsibilities are shared rather than hierarchical.
The actions Hu and her colleagues took are not unique—stories of educators and school staff members rising to address the challenges of the coronavirus pandemic abound. But rarely do these reports delve into what took place before the response to the crisis occurred. They do not mention, for example, whether there was a particular school culture inculcated among staff members that guided how they responded, or whether there were structures and systems put into place beforehand that were set in motion once the crisis emerged.
“The work that led to our wellness calls was due to an effort that took years,” Hu says, referring to the school’s decision in 2014 to transform its culture and operations to align with an approach known widely as community schools.
As Hu explains, “All the work the model requires you to do to build systems and structure to communicate with families paid off.”
The community schools model may just be the path to genuine educational reform. Not privatization. Not “no-excuses discipline.” Not harsh pedagogy of control.
Community schools.
This is a great example of what community schools are capable of accomplishing.
I worked in a school district that provided supportive outreach to students and their families. We were particularly effective in reaching out to the under served foreign community, most of whom were very poor. We held monthly meetings with parents and presented workshops on how to support children at home, how to access social services and how to access financial aid for college among many other topics. We started out with a trickle and ended up with a flood of parents and children, when parents understood we were there to help. We offered babysitting for parents during meetings, and we held meetings on Sunday afternoon, the only time in the week when these parents were not working. This type of service comes at a price, but it is an investment that will pay off in poor students that attend and complete college. We had social workers and translators available. Some of the translators even drove parents to social services and doctor appointments since we were in suburbia with limited public transportation. The district was wise to focus on the need, and the greatest need was to help newly arrived immigrants.
Thank you, retired teacher. Excellent examples. Community Schools work!
Thanks, Yvonne. I know this approach works because I saw very poor ELLs move into the middle class in a single generation. I really felt we were fulfilling the American dream. While we did not have social services directly in the schools other than those employed by the school district, we did connect and even sometimes drive parents to social services. This approach is “equity in action,” and trust is an essential component.
Community schools are an excellent idea. They also seem like a no-brainer! Everyone knows that schools that serve extremely high percentages of families in poverty – families in distress – have challenges that are very different than schools that serve high percentages of affluent students.
In NYC, de Blasio committed a lot of funding to community schools. And you know what? They did not work perfectly. Everything wasn’t hunky dory. It was a new program that provided wonderful new resources to the most highly distressed families in schools where virtually every family was highly distressed, and it had some growing pains and all the students didn’t turn into high performing scholars immediately. So the media bashed it. And they got even progressives to ONLY focus on what went wrong and help the right wing amplify it – which is a real problem if every progressive program has to be executed flawlessly from day one – and to completely minimize (or totally ignore) all the things that went right! There is always going to be problems and getting progressives to unwittingly help the far right undermine good progressive programs by amplifying “failures” and minimizing good things is one of the reasons this country has voters constantly voting against their self-interest.
If community schools start being portrayed positively in the media, there will be a huge backlash again focusing on everything they didn’t achieve, in order to paint this effort as a huge waste of money. I hope we are all prepared to defend that instead of legitimizing it, because it was quite disheartening in NYC to see the pile on when all the good things about de Blasio’s community schools initiative were ignored for political reasons and the flaws were magnified. When the people who run these programs want them to work, they make adjustments so they become better — and that is something the right wing hates so they convince the public (and that includes progressives) that flaws are corruption or a waste of taxpayers money and this wasteful program isn’t worth having.
Community schools are a great idea, but like every good progressive idea, they are always held to an impossible standard of perfection and then get undermined by the right wing for not meeting it.
^^ I will give an example of how this works. The line from the article above:
“Within a month, they had reached out to every family.”
A month? That would become a NYT story focusing on the few families that weren’t contacted until the end of the month and how the “school abandons some families for a month, parents angry that it took weeks for school to get their kids wifi and to make sure their homes had wifi access and they didn’t know what was going on because those lazy school officials didn’t care about them”.
And of course the problem is that when you are dealing with a population of very high poverty families, being able to help them “within a month” is actually an accomplishment, but it also can be turned into a story about indifferent and greedy school officials who were too lazy and for a month these upset and angry families were left without having everything they needed.
Any new program is bound to have its ups and downs. It is important that the staff is on board and trained to meet student and family needs.
Another reason we were able to accomplish so much is that our school district was integrated and not wholly poor. Integration helps poor students tremendously as there are middle class students that help model expectations in terms of conduct and academics. While most of the ELLs were black and brown, most had a positive outlook. They were appreciative of their opportunity, unlike some poor Americans that have been knocked around from systemic racism. Also, we did this before test scores became high stakes so teachers had the freedom to truly teach.
essential summation point: when they work, they become a target
It’s seems obvious to me that high poverty areas need schools with this kind of community outreach.
Instead of sinking so much money into standardized testing, the money would be better spent helping struggling families.