Urban School District: Focus on Community School to Enhance Performance

This article directs its focus on the Normandy School District, an urban school district, and examines the performance outcomes of the community school model to improve performance. The community school model is planned based on two common goals: helping students to learn and be successful, strengthening families and engaging the community social and academic resources to enhance the quality of life.  If community characteristics such as economic disparity are strongly associated with student achievement, then efforts to improve student performance must focus on the community as a whole, not just on the school teaching and learning efforts. Community schools identify the concept that raising student achievement levels in schools must involve more than academics. This model has the potential to end the cycle of economic disparity that consistently places some students behind their peers academically before attending a formal school.

Research has shown a strong correlation between communities with high levels of economic disparity, crime, and low student achievement. Despite these challenges, studies also demonstrate that supportive neighborhoods can diffuse the harmful effects of economic disparity on student performance and create the foundation for high achievement (Holloway, 2004). Education reforms promise to have a limited effect if they focus solely on the teaching and learning in the classroom.  Policymakers may strongly consider what research has shown to be true—what happens in the community can and will affect the teaching and learning process that happen in schools.

The framework of the community school will provides high-quality after-school opportunities, comprehensive early childhood education, real-world learning approaches, in addition to physical and mental health services for adults and young people in the neighborhood.  These services should be designed to remove barriers to learning, make community assets fully available to address the needs of learners, and build strong bonds between schools, families, and communities based on mutual investment in the comprehensive well-being of communities and academic institutions.

At the end of this presentation the participants should be familiar with successful community school initiatives and how to engage all stakeholders in establishing the community school model.

Blank, M. J., Melaville, A., & Shah, B. P. (2003, May). Making the difference: Research and practice in community schools. Washington,

Holloway, J. H. (2004, May). Research link: How the community influences achievement. Educational Leadership, 61(8), 89–90.

Dr. Edward Haynie

Normandy School Broad 

ehaynie@charter.net

ehaynie@normandy.k12.mo.us