A r c h i v e d  I n f o r m a t i o n

Faith Communities' Support for Children's Learning

How did these faith communities—and thousands more like them around the country—get started in supporting schools and local education efforts? What is the appropriate role of faith communities in local education efforts and what are the boundaries for volunteers? How can faith communities build partnerships within their local community to ensure effectiveness and target resources? Before answering these questions, let's look at why family involvement is so important that it calls for a national effort to join together in building family-school-community partnerships.

Did you know that parents and family members are critically important to a child's education?

• Seventy-two percent of children, ages 10-13, said they would like to talk with their parents more about schoolwork. Almost half of older students, ages 14-17, agreed! (National Commission on Children, Speaking of Kids: a National Survey of Children and Parents, 1991)
• Roughly one-half of students get As when one or both parents are highly supportive of their child's education, regardless of whether the child is in a single or dual parent home. (National Center for Education Statistics, Fathers' Involvement in Their Children's Schools, 1997)
• Three factors over which parents exercise authority—school attendance, presence of reading materials in the home, and excessive television watching—account for nearly 90 percent of the difference in eighth-grade math test scores across high-performing and low-performing states. (National Assessment of Educational Progress, 1994). In fact, 30 years of research has shown definitively that parents' involvement counts significantly toward a child's success, or failure, in school.

Appropriate Role for Faith Communities

What is the appropriate role for faith communities in public education and what are the boundaries for volunteers?

Faith communities can be of great support to the efforts of local schools and the families in the community. It is appropriate and encouraged for faith communities to take an active role in supporting children?s learning as part of a partnership with public schools. However, it is not appropriate for members of faith communities to use their involvement in public schools as an occasion to endorse religious activity or doctrine or force participation in a religious activity.

Religious Expression in Public Schools was distributed in August 1995 and again in June 1998 by Secretary of Education Richard Riley. In his cover letter, Secretary Riley emphasizes that these guidelines for religious expression in public schools reflect two basic and equally important obligations of the First Amendment.

First, schools may not forbid students acting on their own from expressing their personal religious views or beliefs solely because they are of a religious nature. Schools may not discriminate against private religious expression by students, but must instead give students the same right to engage in religious activity and discussion as they have to engage in other comparable activity. . . . At the same time, schools may not endorse religious activity or doctrine, nor may they coerce participation in religious activity . . . [T]he right of religious expression in school does not include the right to have a 'captive audience' listen, or to compel other students to participate.

When members and leadership of faith communities volunteer in schools or volunteer to work with students and their families for an educational purpose in partnership with public schools, they should act with the same understanding of the First Amendment as do school officials. Any partnership activities should have a secular purpose, and volunteers in the partnership activities should respect the religious rights of students and the responsibilities of school officials to neither foster nor discourage religious belief or activity. In this light, the following are some guidelines for members and leaders of faith communities who engage in school and education activities in partnership with public schools:

• DON'T participate in student-led religious activities when in your capacity in the educational program, but DO acknowledge students from the educational program when you meet them in a religious context.
• DO stop student speech that constitutes harassment aimed at another student or group of students but DON'T infringe on the rights of students and their family members to speak about religion or to say a prayer or to read a Scripture, provided it is within the reasonable limits of rules for orderliness, talking, and congregating that are set for other speech and activities.
• DON'T prohibit or discourage speech or other activity simply because of its religious content or nature and DON'T pray with the students and families or encourage them to pray during your volunteer session with them.
• DO impart civic values and virtues and encourage positive character development but DON'T preach about your faith to the children and their families while conducting your educational activity.

Public schools, and the programs operated in partnership with them, can neither foster religion nor preclude it. Our public schools must treat religion with fairness and respect and vigorously protect religious expression as well as the freedom of conscience of all other students. In doing so, public school programs reaffirm the First Amendment and enrich the lives of their students.

Faith Communities—Building Partnerships for Action

How do faith communities get started in their efforts to support children's learning and family involvement in education? How can faith communities build partnerships to ensure effectiveness and target resources in the community?

To answer these questions, we can take a look at a process adapted from the business community, modified to reflect the culture, resources, and abilities of faith communities to lead and support community efforts. Templates to help you organize this process are in the resources and reference section of this publication.

Asking What You Can Offer

• Create or highlight a culture in your faith community that supports involvement in education—Does your faith community have a tradition in education, has a literacy program begun, or do you need to raise awareness about the scope of the issue within your community?
• Assess your resources—Evaluate your own organization's capacity for physical plant, volunteers, equipment, materials, transportation, and funds.

Choosing and Recruiting Partners. Understand that better education IS everybody's business—your religious organization or faith community could be the catalyst to help everyone become involved. The key to a successful, sustained community activity is to form partnerships in the community. The greater the number and diversity of people involved, the greater the chance of long-term success. Your partnership might start small—a partnership just within your faith community, with members who are valuable resources because they are also parents, teachers, employers, community leaders, or retired citizens, to name just a few categories of rich experiences. You may then want to expand your partnership to include other faith communities, local schools and school district staff, community groups, and businesses in your area. All of these human resources together will help you decide how to build the most effective partnership.

• Determine who your partners will be—With which schools and educational systems would you like to work? What other community groups are active and interested in helping children learn? What are the educational programs currently being offered in the community?
• Recruit and organize partners—Remember that the relationships you are building around education are partners, not outsiders coming in to "fix" a problem. View the school and other partners as equals who, together, can improve children's learning and the involvement of their families.

Setting Priorities and Goals. Forming a partnership is only part of the process. Once you have all the right people around the table the partnership must decide on its specific priorities and goals and begin to determine the steps necessary in the local community to reach the goals. Differing community needs and circumstances will determine the timeline for this process. Setting a timeline and goal for initiating activities can be one of the first tasks of your partnership. Coordinating your timeline with the school year calendar is a key activity.

• Create a vision together—Be specific in your vision. Associate concrete actions with your statements. Working with school staff, identify priority areas.
• Reconcile the vision with partner goals, current activities of each partner organization, and resource capability—Now that your partnership has a vision, review the policies, programs, and activities of partner members and see how well they fit into the vision and how each partner can help achieve the goals.
• Set up a steering committee—Be sure it is someone's responsibility to coordinate and accomplish each activity and its component parts.
• Set and prioritize short- and long-term goals—Short-term goals can be for the next 4-6 months; long-term goals for the next year and beyond.
• Create a plan and form a team around priorities—Map out the operations needed to be successful, including outreach, networking, monitoring, and evaluation.
• Implement an action plan—Be sure to include timelines, but don't hesitate to revise them if, in practice, they become unrealistic.

Measuring Your Success. Don't stop with implementing your plan—be sure to evaluate it and use the results of your evaluation to measure your progress, inform your community, and plan for the next phase of your project.

• Measure and report progress—Nothing breeds success like success! Be sure to spread the word throughout your community, not only of the successes you've had, but of the challenges that lie ahead.
• Review the annual plan and plan for the future—Measure your progress and use this information to plan the next stage of your project.

Remember to consult the templates in the final chapter. They are designed to help you work through this process with your partners.

Action Areas That Promote Family and Community Involvement in Children's Learning

From national religious organizations to local faith communities, effective partnerships can be formed among people of faith and with organizations outside of the faith community to support schools and family involvement in education. Here are some action areas to consider as your partnership begins to brainstorm on how to reach the goals it has set for itself:

Combat alcohol, drugs, and violence. Prevention programs work best when parents, students, law enforcement officials, and communities join together to provide consistent messages and support comprehensive programs. Members of faith communities can partner with schools to provide mentoring and afterschool programs to give children safe havens from violence and alternatives to drugs.

Several years ago, racial unrest in the Jordon Park area of St. Petersburg, Florida, brought to the forefront one of the issues that many in the community knew already: their youth needed support and attention, particularly in the afterschool hours. A coalition, the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance (IMA), which was formed 24 years ago, came together and formulated the Urban Fellowship Mentoring, Tutoring, and Enrichment Program. They began to pursue ways that they could make the afterschool hours safe and productive for their young people. The Urban Fellowship Program approached the Pinellas County Schools with their ideas and together they found other partners to make their dream a reality. The Urban Fellowship Program, Pinellas County Schools, Juvenile Welfare Board, the National Conference on Community and Justice, and the University of South Florida today are partners in a 21st Century Community Learning Center grant, operating the Johns Hopkins Community Learning Center, providing safe and beneficial afterschool and summer activities to middle school youth in Jordon Park.

Provide mentoring programs. Interested citizens—from employers to college students to members of faith communities to senior citizens—can participate in mentoring programs that provide emotional support and guidance to young people. Mentors can help with schoolwork, job skills development and career planning, and can help connect young people to the potential and importance of college and training beyond high school. The evening hours are a great time for mentors to meet with their students. Senior citizens and college students can even meet in the afternoon hours.

Shiloh Baptist Church in Washington, DC, established a Family Life Center to strengthen and nurture families in the surrounding community, bringing them together for educational, cultural, and recreational activities. One of its educational programs is the Male and Female Youth Enhancement Project, designed to stimulate healthy lifestyles in African American youths ages 8-15 in the community by providing them positive role models, socialization activities, and educational enrichment.

Enlist community volunteers. Community and religious organizations can organize support for young people. Senior citizens in many communities are putting their experience and expertise to work on behalf of children. Volunteers can serve as tutors or teacher aides, work in the library, or help with afterschool activities. Sometimes the best help is for a faith community to add volunteers to an existing program.

The National Jewish Coalition for Literacy has pledged to recruit 100,000 volunteers over five years in response to the America Reads Challenge. In most instances, the Coalition is working with existing literacy programs to support ongoing efforts. In a few communities, the coalition has taken the initiative to start a new partnership. The Coalition's 27 affiliates include Boston, Hartford, Louisville, Atlanta, and Seattle.

Offer before- and afterschool, weekend, and summer learning activities. Community partnerships can make afterschool and summer learning activities available to young people through schools, cultural institutions, park districts, and other public and private agencies. Faith communities can either organize activities or partner with other community groups in on-going programs.

In Jackson, Tennessee, 10 churches have designed a tutoring program in cooperation with the local school system to serve children residing in public housing and other neighborhoods. Three nights a week, church buses provide transportation to church facilities where 250 volunteers work with 350 children, providing assistance in reading and math. Volunteers from the tutoring program also raise funds to purchase school supplies and then operate a school supply "store" that gives school supplies to students prior to the opening of school.

Support early childhood development and preschool programs. New scientific findings on brain development in very young children point to the importance of children's earliest experiences in helping them get off to a strong and healthy start. Community and religious organizations can help children start on the right path by supporting programs that work with young children and their parents, offering educationally based child care programs, and special activities for children and their parents.

The Sixth Episcopal District of the African-Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church (Georgia) launched an America Reads Challenge project with emphasis on rural areas. "Meeting Our Community in Their Community" launched a campaign to provide a home library for every family in several rural areas. The fourth Sunday of each month was declared "My New Books Sunday." The project culminated in a special learning and recreational event featuring storytelling, reading aloud, and a time for children to pick out their new books.

Moving National Efforts to the Local Level

Many national religious organizations are committed to being a part of improving the educational opportunities available to children in the local communities that are served by their houses of worship. Together, national organizations, their local affiliates, schools, communities, and individuals can make a positive difference in family involvement in education and help children achieve high standards and improve schools. In today's world of expanding educational and technological opportunities, it is more important than ever to find effective and efficient ways to move national initiatives to the local, grassroots level, because that is where the real action—helping children learn—takes place!

As a national organization working with local affiliates, communities, and individuals, it is important to understand the mission, needs, resources, and capacity of local communities. While the easier question to answer is usually "What are the needs?", the harder question is "What can I do to meet these needs?". Here are some tips for national organizations to help local affiliates successfully carry out a national initiative in a community.

Getting Started. Work with local communities from the beginning of the project. Local communities must buy into and feel ownership of the program by determining their own needs and recognizing their own capacity to help.

Needs Assessment. Help local organizers or coordinators assess needs and identify assets within their community. Develop a survey questionnaire to assess needs or share assessment instruments used elsewhere. Help organizers to address demographics, cultural awareness and appreciation, and language barriers in their planning. Include communication tools (for example, all schools linked in a network), acknowledge existing networks, and recognize that many community leaders wear different "hats" (for example, a business leader may also be a member of a faith community and a Scout leader).

Share Information. Share information about resources that exist outside of the community. Design a resource package for local organizers that includes examples of resources available from federal and state governments and from other communities that may have designed similar programs. Keep the size of the resource package manageable. This book represents one such resource you can use.

Guidance. Provide guidance on building local partnerships. Information should include getting the right players around the table, working with school systems, and sharing examples of how this has been done successfully. Additionally, the role of a local coordinator should be defined.

Goals. Specify the goals of the nationwide initiative. Clarify how the national initiative correlates to the goals of the local affiliates. Encourage local involvement in a national initiative (such as the U.S. Department of Education's America Goes Back to School initiative) in a way that makes sense—a way that will fit local affiliates' needs and match their capacities.

Results. Provide information to locals about what results should be measured and ideas on how to carry out an evaluation. Give examples or help create consistent and realistic evaluation tools, including anecdotal evidence, survey forms, and other reporting mechanisms. Encourage local organizers to include evaluation as part of the program from the beginning.

The Comprehensive Health Education Foundation published a book entitled Renewing the Partnership: The Mainline Church in Support of Public Education. This book serves as a resource to local faith communities about how to be appropriately involved in supporting education in their community. It calls for a partnership of religious leaders and educators working together to ensure the most effective quality education for all children. An update of this book is planned for fall 1999.

The United Methodist Church published Education, The Gift of Hope, and provided it to all UMC parishes to encourage their support for and involvement in public education and children's learning. The UMC followed up this publication with a parish study guide to help local churches establish partnerships with local schools, bring the education conversation to the entire community, and support families and life-long learning.

Structured Activities for Your Faith Community

Beginning your activities with a focus can help lead to success in your efforts, keep your partnership moving forward, and recruit others to join with you. Whether you are working on reading, safe schools, mentoring, college going, or early childhood, the following activities can give you the structure your partnership needs to kick off its involvement efforts and sustain its activities to support children's learning.

America Goes Back to School!

America Goes Back to School is an annual "call to action" for communities to have a role and a stake in improving education by getting involved and staying involved in their local schools. This initiative encourages parents, grandparents, community leaders, employers and employees, members of the arts community, faith communities, and every caring adult to show children how much they value education by celebrating the opening of school and helping them learn all year long. When families, communities, and schools work together—from kindergarten through college—schools work better and students learn more. Religious communities can play a vital role by helping to strengthen home-school connections.

To answer the America Goes Back to School call to action, faith communities can:

• Help make schools safer by conducting conflict resolution workshops that teach children how to settle disputes peacefully and respond when someone is bothering them. Work with students on an anti-violence campaign.
• Encourage family involvement in education by sponsoring "family math" or "family science" programs or events where members of your congregation, especially business leaders, engage in conversation about careers in science and math with both students and their families. Targeting middle school students is especially important, because they will soon be making course selections and decisions that impact their ability to attend college or other postsecondary education.
• Help set a reading and literacy goal for your community—to read 30 minutes a day, five days a week. Reward children who meet this goal by sponsoring a special activity in your facility, conducting an awards ceremony for parents and children, or providing a new book with donations from the congregation as a reward for a job well done.
• Emphasize high standards by convening an assembly, discussion group, or afterschool program at which members of your community tell personal stories to students and their families about how "going the extra mile made a difference in my life." This will reinforce the benefits of having high standards that require discipline, extra effort, dedicated study, and persistence.
• Help in the drive to make sure technology is available to all students by being a neighborhood center that offers afterschool computer activities and also provides a safe haven for students. Open your center to parents and young adults in the evening for job-training and skills acquisition.
• Organize volunteers in the community who will help local middle and high school students learn about different college programs and the college application process. Help them fill out applications and financial aid forms as well as provide information on scholarships. Collect donations to provide funding for college application fees.

A coalition of faith communities and education associations in Phoenix, Arizona, uses America Goes Back to School as a focal point each year to honor teachers—current and retired—for the work they do on behalf of children and youth. Teachers are honored at each participating religious community's worship service and then come together in a joint location for presentation of certificates, followed by refreshments, to honor their contributions.

Religion and Education Summit

The goal of a Religion and Education Summit is to bring together leadership representing both communities of faith and schools to discuss issues of concern to the community and to build partnerships that bring about the changes needed for the benefit of all children. Successful summits have been held in several areas of the country and have resulted in lasting partnerships that positively affect children and youth.

Lawrence, Massachusetts, was the site for a Religion and Education Summit that brought together faith and education leaders from throughout New England. Participants learned about the Partnership for Family Involvement in Education and the appropriate roles for faith communities in supporting education in their local communities. The afternoon was devoted to working together in statewide groups to design a plan of action for joint projects and activities. Each group pledged to continue meeting with each other to get their projects off the ground. As a result, projects in many New England communities were begun-tutoring and mentoring, afterschool, reading, and school safety-all benefiting children and youth.

A Religion and Education Summit held at Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky, drew participants from across the state and from neighboring school districts in Ohio and Tennessee. This summit's goal was to bring together faith communities, educators, and institutions of higher education to encourage middle and high school students to work toward achieving high standards and make realistic plans for post-secondary education. Kentuckiana Metroversity, a coalition of colleges, universities, and seminaries in the greater Louisville area, is coordinating follow-up activities to keep alive the excitement generated at the summit.

The final section of this book contains a step-by-step guide to bringing together your community for a Religion and Education Summit.

Join the Partnership for Family Involvement in Education

The Partnership for Family Involvement in Education was started in September 1994 by Secretary of Education Richard W. Riley to encourage and support families' involvement in children's learning to high standards. The Partnership is a growing grassroots organization of schools, employers, educators, families, religious groups, and community organizations who recognize their interdependent roles in supporting family and community involvement in children's learning and in improving schools and raising student achievement.

The Partnership's mission is:

• to increase opportunities for families to be more involved in their children's learning at school and at home; and
• to use family-school-community partnerships to strengthen schools and improve student achievement.

Because family participation in children's learning is often influenced by work schedules and time constraints, it is crucial that businesses, community and religious organizations, and especially families and schools support parent and employee involvement in education. By taking into account all of these constraints on family time and staying child-focused, there is a much greater chance that the child will receive the support he or she needs. To encourage such support, the Department of Education administers the Partnership and offers resources, ideas, funding and conferences relevant to family involvement in education. Partners across the sectors—Employers for Learning, Community Organizations, Religious Groups, and Family-School Partnerships—commit to increasing family participation in children's learning through a variety of activities and efforts, some of which are: student- and family-friendly policies at the workplace, before- and afterschool programs, tutoring and mentoring initiatives, and donations of facilities and technologies.

The Religious Group sector of the Partnership for Family Involvement in Education actively promotes family and community involvement in education. From national leadership activities to local tutoring, mentoring, and afterschool programs operated by faith communities, the Partnership's Religious Community group has been making a difference in the lives of children and families.

As a member of the Partnership, you'll learn about new information, materials, and studies; be able to link up with other organizations working toward the same goals; and be a part of a national effort to encourage and enable families to be involved in their children's learning. Join now, and make a difference in the life of a child. A sign-on form is available at the Partnership for Family Involvement in Education web site.

[Examples from the Field]

[Priority Education Issues]