As Maryland launches (belatedly, after overriding a veto) into the Blueprint for school reform, education writer Jeff Bryant in The Progressive magazine identifies a problem of trust that can be repaired through developing these innovative "wraparound services" schools. "By emphasizing communication and trust-building," Bryant says, "they offer a solution for repairing the frayed relationship between parents and schools."
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/By Jeff Bryant <> The Progressive/ 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, âimmediately went into overdrive to connect with as many families as possible,â she tells me.Â
Working late into the evening, the staff members made âwellness callsâ to deliver messages of care and reassurance. âOur message was, âWe are not abandoning you. What do you need? We still care,â â 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.
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.Â
Their efforts yielded critical information about how families were affected by the pandemic and what kinds of challenges they facedâsuch 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.
âWe knew there would be certain things our families probably needed,â Hu recalls. âBut we didnât make assumptions. We knew to ask open-ended questions.â
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 establish permanent âcoordinated care teamsâ 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 didnât wait for directives from higher-ups. Instead, they relied on a well-practiced behavior of âco-creating,â 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 uniqueâstories 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.
âThe work that led to our wellness calls was due to an effort that took years,â Hu says, referring to the schoolâs decision in 2014 to transform its culture and operations to align with an approach known widely as community schools.
As Hu explains, âAll the work the model requires you to do to build systems and structure to communicate with families paid off.â
So far in 2022, media outlets have promoted a prevailing narrative that the bonds between families and their public schools have become more strained than ever before, and that parents have taken on a more adversarial relationship with schools. Huâs school, and others like it that are guided by the community schools model, may show what a successful relationship between parents and schools could look like.Â
When Hu was studying for a masters degree in social work, she became motivated to work with families in settings where they felt most comfortable, which she felt would be a school. For her first job as a social worker, she tried the San Francisco school district, and, fortunately, it was hiring.
Hu âbecame rivetedâ with community schools, because, she says, their approach builds âthe infrastructure that embeds values in the fabric of the school.âÂ
What are some of those values? One, Hu maintained, is making sure kids feel theyâre cared for. Another is to cultivate a culture of listening to students and families, and then building and attending to a system that promotes ongoing communications among the school, families, and the surrounding community.Â
That may sound easy, but itâs not. âItâs a shift in thinking about . . . families having a partnership role in the school,â Hu says. âItâs about having the mindset to be attuned to the needs of the whole child and have a community culture that supports this. This mindset has to be cultivated.â
Paula Oxoby Hayett, a community school coordinator at Eno Garcia Elementary School in Taos, New Mexico, echoes a similar belief when she describes the strengths her school had in place that helped it weather the COVID-19 storm.
âThereâs a tendency to want to jump in with solutions,â she says, âbut itâs important to come to conversations with fresh eyes and open ears. And people with skin in the game must be part of any solution.â
Though her grade K-5 school, located in a small town, has concerns and interests that may differ greatly from a school located in a big city like San Francisco, Oxoby Hayettâs description of the family engagement process that is entailed in the community schools approach closely matches what Hu describes.
When the school chose to take up the community schools model in 2019, it took the customary first step of conducting an assessment that included reaching out to parents, via emails, texts, and phone calls. Â
âTeachers donât always have time to have these sorts of conversations with parents, to ask families, âWhatâs your vision [for what the school should be],ââ Oxoby Hayett explains. But the community schools approach puts in place an onsite coordinator and the structures for enabling those conversations to take place.
â[In our needs assessment] we made a conscientious effort to ask, âHow would you like to contribute [to helping improve the school],â â Oxoby Hayett recalls. What they heard back was that parents wanted to be more engaged in the daily workings of the school.
Consequently, she adds, âOur approach has been to build from within. We donât have the [external] infrastructure to lean on, so we have to build it ourselves.â
Ultimately, what that entailed was to match up parent desires for more engagement with opportunities to volunteer for the school. Currently, one parent is teaching Spanish in the afterschool program. A studentâs dad is coaching soccer. One studentâs uncle is coaching basketball and anotherâs mom runs the Spanish club.
The school also enlisted parents and community members to serve as âfamily navigatorsâ who pitch in to help make calls to families to check in with them, to distribute devices for connecting to the Internet, and to make sure families have books and other materials they need.
The family navigators proved to be indispensable sources for outreach and parent contact when the pandemic struck.
âCommunity schools . . . are about system transformation,â Anne Egan, a consultant working with schools in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, says.
Truth or Consequences, a small rural town with fewer than 11,000 people, is located on the Rio Grande River in the southeastern part of the state.
âThe county has been losing jobs and population for two decades,â she tells me. Substance use disorders, as well as incarceration rates, are rife in the community. The surrounding countyâs poverty rate is 22 percent, well above the stateâs overall rate of 18 percent.
âIn the fall of 2020, we were struggling to connect with families [reluctant to return to in-person learning],â Egan recalls. When nearly eighty students did not show up when schools opened, the principal and the community schools coordinator for the school called, texted, and emailed every family and then began going door-to-door.Â
The message to families, Egan says, was consistent: âWe know this is hard. What are your problems? How can we help?â Eventually, the missing students came back before headcount totals had to be sent to the state to secure the schoolâs per-pupil funding.
In the old way of doing school, teachers, by default, served as frontline staff for mental and physical health services.
Through her work with helping schools implement the community schools approach, Egan has learned there has to be shared leadership where stakeholders in the school and the surrounding community are represented, and the focus is on creating equity-based opportunity.
âThis goes against the old, bureaucratic ways of running schools,â she says. âIt takes time, and itâs hard, but itâs how the magic happens.â
In the old way of doing school, teachers, by default, served as frontline staff for mental and physical health services. But partnerships that develop in the community schools approach create a synergy that relieves teachers of that work and keeps them focused on what they do bestâteaching.
Finally, according to Egan, there has to be trust. Local school councils should be open for a wide spectrum of people to participate. People need to be invited into helping with the schoolâs operations and programs. Schools should ask people what they want and then listen to them. They should show they care about students by including them in meetings and conversations.Â
Then, over time, trust comes about when people see a history of the school saying what it is going to do and then doing it.
These schools are part of a growing trend to adopt the community schools approach. The Biden Administration has proposed to dramatically increase the federal governmentâs funding of its community schools grant program from $40 million to $443 million. And California has launched an ambitious effort to spend $3 billion on converting thousands of schools to the model.
âThe pandemic,â Hu says, âshone a light on how school can be reimagined by pushing the boundaries on what schools can be for our families and our communities.â It showed that âschools can make progress through real collaboration.â
Jeff Bryant  is the lead fellow of The Progressive's Public Schools Advocate project, and a writing fellow and chief correspondent for Our Schools, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
This article was originally published March 2 by The Progressive magazine's Public Schools Advocate project" <https://progressive.org/public-schools-advocate/community-schools-could-fix-major-problem-education-bryant-220302/> and is republished here by permission.
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