Putting the Community Back in Community Schools: Research and Strategies for Advocacy

• In Event: Community Schools Across Cities: At the Intersections of Inequity, Power, and Radical Possibilities

Abstract

In Baltimore, there are over 50 community schools at various stages of implementation to support an increasing portion of its 82,000 students, over 85% of whom are African-American and low income. Community schools have been overseen by a local management board, and enacted by several non-profit intermediaries in partnership with local schools. Community schools have been seen by school leaders as a better way of addressing the needs of the students, rather than just focusing on academics, which at least one study supports, (Durham & Connolly, 2016).
A critical component of community schools in Baltimore is that they employ coordinators whose job is to coordinate services (i.e. health care, social services, recreation, and academic support) for the entire school community. Some of these coordinators are community residents, but many are not, which makes building the partnerships challenging. Moreover, with several non-profit partners, there is unevenness in how the community schools look across the city. Some emphasize health and wellness, others recreation, and others academic support.
What is missing, according to some community school coordinators, is community members themselves in the decision-making process. Community members have insight into the history of the community, they have relationships across community, and they know what the community needs. Having them involved in the decision-making processes at the school can help organize those community members in order to advocate on a variety of community needs, including school funding, employment, and housing.
Community schools may not have been intentionally designed to keep community members out of decision-making at the schools, but their absence has spurred at least one community school coordinator to create their own governing bodies to include to voices of community members. This presentation will focus on the steering committee at Forest Park High School, in which community school coordinator, Shanelle England, has sought to create a group which would inform decision-making at the school. It has had successes and challenges, and this presentation will discuss ways in which community-engaged research (Small & Uttall, 2005) will be brought to bear to unearth the vision of the community members for their school. The hope is that this research will help develop a stronger model for a community school that has the community truly represented and able to advocate on its own behalf.

Small, S. A., & Uttal, L. (2005). Action-oriented research: Strategies for engaged scholarship. Journal of Marriage and Family, 67(4), 936–948.

Author

• Jessica Shiller, Towson University