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Partnerships, by definition, depend on some form of community involvement. Earlier sections of this document discuss community involvement in terms of recruitment, provision of student support services, and roles in school-to-work transition activities. The following descriptions detail two of the more unusual means of involving community members, parents, and others in partnership endeavors. One is included because successful efforts to involve parents in activities that help support educational reform were rare among the partnerships we studied. Another is included as an example of both a practical and a political tool. The third brought the entire community together. Common to the practices was their function in creating willingness to support educational activities and build relationships with schools.
Word processing courses were held for parents at the middle school. The parent computer course component was included both to encourage more parent involvement in the schools and to increase the value parents attached to their children's computer studies. Parent education worked toward goals of building internal school capacity for sustained innovative use of computer-based technologies in order to regularly enrich the learning experiences of disadvantaged students.
Participating parents learned word processing skills. Working parents later reported being given more opportunities at their places of employment as a result of participating in the program. Unemployed parents saw this as a means of increasing their marketability. After completing the course, several parents purchased or expressed plans to purchase home computers. Finally, school staff reported increases in parent-initiated contacts. Parents also reported increased comfort in communicating with school teachers and administrators.
The Interactive Learning Environment (ILE) was a districtwide project serving middle school students and their parents. It was intended to strengthen and expand district administrator, teacher, student, and parent use of technology in the improvement of education. Further, increasing parent computer literacy was seen as a means of making parents more comfortable discussing their children's work with teachers and their children.
The primary partnership was comprised of the school district, Bank Street College, and the Center for Children and Technology (CCT). Most partnership meetings involved the members of the design team, comprised of the project director, the science and mathematics coordinators for the district, principal and teacher coordinators from the school, and staff from the CCT. The CCT staff assisted with the instructional design of the program and staff development, and also were the researchers and evaluators for the project. Other partnership advisory board members were available as needed to provide technical assistance and staff training. The math and science coordinators spent half of their time on ILE-related activities. They developed new strategies and provided support to other teachers who were beginning to work with the technology. Teachers, once they mastered new technologies, promoted the program and trained administrators and other teachers.
The project conducted two 15-session weekly word processing courses for parents each year. The sessions were held in the IBM computer lab of the middle school. Parents were taught word processing by writing memos, business letters, and personal letters using Word Perfect 5.1 on PCs in a networked environment. By attending computer sessions on the school campus, parents felt more comfortable with not only computers and word processing, but with school personnel and facilities as well.
Parents were informed of the computer course through fliers distributed to their children at the school site. Fliers also were posted at the district office and at each school. Child care was provided by a licensed teacher who conducted arts and crafts activities for the participants' children, ages 3-14. This was a particularly important feature because most of the participants were from low-income families and would be unable to take the courses and pay for baby sitters or child care.
The parent training program was a successful program component. The parent computer course was included in the program for two reasons. First, the course was included to encourage more parent involvement in the schools. Second, it was intended to increase the value parents attached to their children's computer studies. Both of these outcomes worked toward the goal of building the internal school capacity for computer technologies to improve the learning experiences of students.
Somers Intermediate School #242 serves an economically depressed population with little prior exposure to innovative instructional programs. This school had no history of involvement with advanced technology prior to the partnership project. Project funding was used to build a state-of-the-art computer center in the school and to provide intensive staff development in computer-aided instruction. The success in training novice computer users to provide quality instruction to students and parents in a previously technology-poor environment indicates that this practice holds promise in other appropriately equipped contexts, providing sufficient staff development. Further, the ability to interest and involve previously uninvolved parents in a school-based activity also speaks to the promise of this practice in other contexts, provided adequate child care is made available.
As one means of addressing the need to bring together the resources and expertise of key partners and programs, resource directories were developed for six regions in a state. This effort was part of a statewide project that focused on supporting school reform in order to improve educational outcomes. Resource directories contain the profiles of businesses who agreed to become involved in education-related activities as called upon. Resource directories include a description of the business-related learning opportunities, job titles and education descriptions for individual employees, and contact information if teachers wished to reach a member of the business community to plan an activity.
Resource directories were developed and were used in seven targeted regions. General exposure to the directory did not promote its use by teachers. However, teachers who attended workshops demonstrating the usefulness of the resource directories expressed enthusiasm and became motivated to use the directories. Consequently, about half the schools in each of the participating districts used the directory as a first tool in establishing partnership relationships with local businesses.
Vermont Educational Partnership Project (VEPP) was a statewide educational reform project. The overall goal was to bring together the resources and expertise of key partners and programs around the state to form a dynamic alliance in support of educational change. VEPP offered several components including regional workshops for businesses and schools on partnership concepts and strategies, parents as partners workshops, resources on teenage-specific problems, and an opportunity awareness program for students at risk of not completing school. Additionally, a course was designed to instruct teachers to create business-related classroom learning opportunities for students, and a dimensions-in-learning course was offered to high school students and potential business employees using an apprenticeship program model. The project also included technical and hands-on assistance in the development of mentor programs in businesses and schools. Finally, the project created a series of regional directories that identified education-related activities that business people, educators, and community organization leaders could use collaboratively to support systemic school reform.
The resource directories include descriptions of the business products and services, job titles and education descriptions for individual employees, and contact information. Information from the six resource directories was being compiled with other survey and partnership resources on an electronic database that would be accessible to all schools and communities within Vermont.
The process used to develop resources directories involved project staff meeting with 5-10 influential school and business leaders in each region. Businesses were selected for inclusion through a referral process. First, leaders in the business industry were solicited. Then participants from this core group of business leaders were asked to solicit the participation of other businesses. Project staff met with business leaders to discuss the potential usefulness of developing a resource directory and explained the characteristics of the resource directory profile, following which the business leaders were invited to participate. Business information from one of the most successful regions was personally gathered by high school students. Introducing the plan to work on the directories also provided a vehicle for bringing business and education leaders together to discuss the potential usefulness of establishing relationships with one another. The referral and face-to-face follow-up process was successful, increasing the participant pool by three to five times. Letters and surveys sent to businesses without face-to-face meetings proved fruitless.
Workshops were conducted to show teachers how to use the directories. This proved to be a crucial element of the practice as only teachers that attended the workshops used the directories.
Partnership staff developed resource directories to help participants avoid wasting time "reinventing the wheel" and missing opportunities by overlooking local resources. Pursuing listings for the resource directory also heightened community awareness of local school reform efforts and resources offered by other community members. Developing the directory provided a way for businesses to communicate their willingness to support educational activities and build relationships with schools. As the resource directories were being updated, there was interest to include school resources that were available to businesses (e.g., meeting space, athletic/exercise facilities, adult education, communication skills).
Most participating communities are rural and had relatively limited business resources. Four regions with populations of under 20,000 included the resources of approximately 20 businesses. The two more metropolitan regions developed resource directories that profiled 40 and over 100 businesses, respectively. Thus, this practice is best incorporated as an adjunct to ongoing activities supported by business relationships. The database system eventually might have included a "how-to" menu for starting and maintaining partnerships as well as other support and technical assistance resources for schools, businesses, and community organizations.
VEPP findings showed that establishing resource directories aided in starting and maintaining business and community partnerships with schools. The regions that were most successful at creating meaningful systemic reform initiatives built higher-level partnerships upon the foundation of resource directories.
Among the project's initial activities was a six-week series of public hearings to obtain community input regarding the current status of and suggested short-term directions for the school district. The hearings were conducted by the Commission for Positive Change in the Oakland (CA) Public Schools, an independent entity supported by the project, in multiple languages and at diverse locations throughout the city of Oakland in order to reach the economically and ethnically diverse population served by the district. Project partners and staff capitalized on this initial engagement of the community to further promote community involvement in a variety of school reform efforts. This was accomplished by facilitating community meetings, developing multilanguage brochures, hosting media briefings, and encouraging lobbying efforts.
Community involvement in school board deliberations was greater than at any time in recent history, according to partnership members and school personnel. In addition, the newly selected superintendent embraced wholeheartedly the project-developed Education Plan, and she immediately began working closely with organizations that were project partners.
In addition, the heightened visibility of the partnership that resulted from the hearings reportedly led to greater community interest in the partnership's other efforts, including support for the district's Career Academies and use of the project's Mentoring Center, which provided training and technical assistance for this purpose for young people in the immediate region.
The goal of the overall project was to foster a community-based plan for districtwide educational reform and school restructuring. Additionally, the project aimed to improve community-school relationships and reduce community apathy and district reluctance about educational reform, restructuring, and systemic change. The partnership's primary emphasis was on formulating long-term plans, identifying and securing resources, providing technical assistance and training, and conducting evaluations.
In the initial stages of the project, one of the partners, the Commission for Positive Change, was given the primary role in developing a community-based plan for change. A series of public hearings were held in many different locations and in multiple languages over a six-week period. Hearings included small-group workshops in which a cumulative total of 1,500 attendees were asked what they would like to see accomplished in the schools in the next 18 months. Two months later, 100,000 copies of a synthesis of the results were distributed to parents, district office employees, community-based organizations, health clinics, and others.
The partnership was involved over the next two years in the development of the school district's long-term plan for school reform. The concept was influenced initially by planning documents drawn up by one of the primary partnership groups, and the district hired two partnership members to aid in this effort. Reflecting the partnership philosophy of inclusion, further avenues were created through which the community became informed, mobilized, and involved in the plan's development. These avenues included facilitating community meetings, developing multilanguage brochures, hosting media briefings, and encouraging lobbying efforts.
In mid-1994, approximately three years after the Five-Year Plan became operational, the district began a search for a new superintendent. Concerned about the potential negative consequences of what some termed the "new plan syndrome" that had accompanied the last five superintendent changes in this city, the partners became instrumental in facilitating processes that led to changing the name of the plan to the Education Plan. This action sent a clear message to local politicians, school board members, district administrators, and others that the community not only helped to develop a plan for its schools, but also assumed ownership of the plan and expected it to be carried out.
Consequently, the Commission for Positive Change developed a brochure detailing what the community expected from the new superintendent (i.e., implementation of the Education Plan) and what the community wanted included in the selection process (i.e., requiring each candidate to submit a proposal for implementing and building on the Education Plan).
Oakland is a city with a large low-income and minority population. In the late 1980s, the district suffered school board scandal, negative press, political upheaval, and lack of community support. In the year before receiving OERI funding, there had been several interim superintendents, and the position had been vacant for over six months. The ethnically diverse school board serving during the project experienced political strains among represented constituencies and between more and less experienced members, and the school board remained politically important.
Copies of most of the materials created for public involvement are available.
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[PartII: Section V: Portrait of a Promising Partnership]