Getting the Community to Support Your School

School-Community Relations are important because they allow a school district to put its best foot forward.  As educators, I think we do a tremendous job in our classrooms.  However, by not “showing off” what we do on an everyday basis, our talents and work are boiled down into our AYP and our ACT scores.  In order to measure success in our schools we need to show there are more measures of success.  It is our responsibilities as educators to educate the public as to what we are doing in the classroom.  New technology and media make that prospect easier today than it has ever been, however many in our profession continue to do very little to show the “outside world” what they are doing and how well they are educating our kids.  Increasing public knowledge about the kinds of programs and the type of education children are receiving better demonstrates worth to the public than relying on an AYP or Act score. 

Sure a school without a good Community Relations plan will survive.   However, I think as leadership transitions from person to person without a set of policies and procedures there won’t be the kind of consistency and continuity that schools of the 21^st Century should have.   In many jobs you have the outgoing person train the incoming person and that may work for some school districts, but what happens when the outgoing person is not competent or is leaving under duress, their attitude toward the school and the district may be less accommodating to that new person leaving them without any real understanding of the situation they are walking in to.  Having a plan developed allows for districts, school boards, and community to have a better grasp of how their schools should run and what types of things take place in their schools. 

Creating two-way communications between groups allows for the free flow of information so that the schools understand the educational needs of the community and the community understands and supports the educational mission of the school.  I think disseminating the educational message of a school through different channels is important so that you can try to reach a variety of publics.  In doing so we would hope to inspire a dialogue with those publics in attempts to get them to get involved in school affairs.  Five specific actions I would take would be in an elementary school would be:

1 ) INFORMATION: I would implement a school blog and a twitter account.  This would be used to update parents regarding daily and upcoming events.  I want to have a place I can refer parents and interested parties to where they can get correct information about programs and achievements of my school.  I want have open access for people to view and also want to promote it using social media like Twitter and Facebook.  Incorporating social media allows for quicker and less expensive means of communicating with a large segment of our community.

2.) PROGRAMMING: I would work with the PTA and the SBDM to come up with a Fall Festival or Concert.  The goal we be immediacy.  By having a program (fall festival, song fest, science fair, Christmas pageant, etc.) early in the year we can promote attendance and reach out to everyone early in the school year.  The program in itself is just a shell for a meet-and-greet in the community where we establish communication and open the discussion about what kind of education we are giving students at our school.   We would have tables where parents can sign up for information, volunteering, joining the PTA, they can use our computers to see our website and we can get them to join our Twitter feed and Facebook page.  From there I would look to adapt our programming based on informal surveying of the attendees by staff and myself.  My goal would be for at least one of these larger school-wide meet and greets a quarter, but I’d prefer to have 1 a month.

3.) FOLLOW-UP:  Using the school data base, the PTA, and the SBDM, I would send a survey home with students to see how their educational needs were being meet and to see what we can do to better educate our children with the resources we have.

4.) COMMUNITY SPONSORSHIP: Coming from a background in sports I would look for local businesses to sponsor our programming events in order to off-set the costs of the events.  I would provide sponsorship spaces for those that required it.  Generally, local businesses will support local schools.  Donations are tax deductable.  At the elementary school I recently subbed at we could get sponsors to pay for inflatables and provide prizes for our fall festival.  A “Fall Festival” with free inflatables and a DJ or live music would get kids to want to come and if kids want to come, parents will follow.

5.)EXTENSION CLASSES: I would institute workshops and extension classes in our school on weeknights or weekends to get parents to come to the school and for them also to realize that we are an educational resource for our entire community, not just for our children.  Bringing in speakers and having workshops on a variety of topics from technology to gardening would hopefully build ties with our parents and our community.  I would like to see our parking lot used as a Farmer’s Market on the weekends where once the Farmer’s Market is over, extension classes take place in the cafeteria.  Then hopefully, following the market would be a recital or some evening activity that would engage even more of our community and our parents and students.  I want my school to be an educational extension for the entire family and hope that in doing so we get the entire family invested in our school and what we are doing.

Connecting Community: Restaurants

When I graduated from High School in Sacramento,  I was lucky enough to get a job at a local restaurant called Eat Your Vegetables (EYV).  It was a start-up venture from three local businessmen. It was my first taste of branding and marketing.  It was also my first exposure to building community through your business.

For EYV, the idea was to have a healthy food-conscious restaurant that served the community.  They baked all their breads and muffins on site, made the batter by hand, dressings, soups all made fresh and by hand.  Food was bought locally or made on site. For a kid who didn’t eat salad it was quite eye opening.  They challenged me to eat better, to eat fresh.  The day old muffins and bread were donated to Soup Kitchens around the city.  They recycled, reused, and became a leading light of healthy living in the community.

Good restaurants are a mirror of their community; reflecting, drawing in the local citizenry and providing a common table for the community.

Many restaurants now try to follow in this mold of being good global citizen, of using local products that compliment their surroundings. One of the most acclaimed new restaurants is called Husk in South Carolina.

Its menu depends on what local ingredients are fresh.  Its chef, Sean Brock, understands the imporantance of place, especially in a restaurant setting.  Brock says, “if it doesn’t come from the South, it’s not coming through the door.”  

More and more, chefs are realizing that their power is in capturing the locale of a place.  Defining their restaurants and decor by the area around them.  Great restaurants do that.  One of my favorite is in Newport.  It’s called Pompillio’s.  

They’ve been doing it since 1933.  The restaurant is as you can imagine, Italian.  The food is homemade.  The “gravy” is excellent!  But even so they realize that just having the first liquor license in the state of Kentucky doesn’t make you a great restaurant.

  

Out back, you can find bocce ball tournaments to go with your tortellini.  They have created a place that serves the community.  In 1933 it was an Italian neighborhood, now even through gentrification, its home asthetic, and community appeal never ceases and is still a go-to place for families in the tri-state area.

Understanding place and connecting with the community is important for any restaurant.  Even now there is a restaurant opening in Arkansas under the guidance of the Oxford American Magazine.

 

Connecting Community: Farmer’s Markets

Farmer’s Markets are not just a place to get fresh locally grown produce, but there are also a place where community can connect and grow.  Having a farmer’s market supports the local farmers and the local community as a whole as money spent in the community stays in the community.  All of this helps revitalize our neighborhoods and towns.  It is a simple idea, yet in our community in North Eastern Kentucky all of the “farmer’s markets” are out in the outlining parts of the county.  None are centrally located and provide the amenities you see in other towns.

Here is the farmer’s market in Lexington.  It has grown since I moved to Eastern Kentucky.

 

Buying local food helps the local economy and gets better food to our tables.  With the current health crisis we are in our area.

There is also a movement to be able to use Food Stamps or Electronic Benefit Transfers, EBT cards at the Farmer’s Market.

Think of all of the local farms and jobs we could support if we helped support the family farm in our areas.

Farmer’s Markets have become a place where community can gather and share and help keep their local economies viable.  They have become community centers where people can not only find and share great food and culture.

Connecting Community: Oral History

I started first thinking about oral history when I listened to the stories of my Grandfather and Grandmother.  They lived rich, vibrant lives.  My grandfather was a gifted storyteller with the story becoming so much more in the pauses, the breaths, his gestures.  At the time, I thought I would be too presumptuous to ask to record them.  Regretfully, I didn’t.  I still have their stories in my head, I repeat them and try to remember them exactly so that I can tell them to my sons someday when they are old enough.

Here’s one interesting bit of family history that was almost lost through my family as it was mistold to me.  I proposed to my wife with a “family ring.”  The ring was from a young girl in the family who had fallen in love with a “Carny” and was going to run off and marry him.  She eventually “came to her senses” and this is the ring.

After researching it, the young girl who I was told was a cousin, is my Grandfather’s Mother, Helen Dowsey.  The “Carney” was actually a chauffeur.

I first started to look at storytelling as a real artform when I read the work of Zora Neale Hurston and her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.  I think Oral histories fall into this category as well.  The older I get the more I like them.  You can find them on the web through folks like Appalshop.

I saw recently where the Southern Foodways Alliance is conducting classes to help teach the next generation of historians how to record the oral histories of those around us.

I was always amazed at the process of Alan Lomax to go out and track down rural musicians and record their stories and songs.

With digital technology like it is today we have a real opportunity to make sure that the history and traditions of the our current living generations is documented and not forgotten.  Creating a living breathing history that is connected to people rather than just dates makes for a history that kids will cherish and want to remember rather than just a bunch of numbers and names in a book.

As educators if we can make these connections with kids through their own families or the culture around them they seem to identify with the material better and retain it longer.

Keeping Kids Creative Over The Summer Months

Keeping kids busy in the Summer is always a difficult proposal for parents.  There are trips to amusement parks, museums, and relatives.  But what about all the other days?  

The creator of Vimeo has created an safe online space where kids can create and share their work.  The creation is called DIY.ORG

Kids would create an oline handle and nickname and then post their work.  People can go online and give stickers for the work they like.  The whole experience is to hopefully push kids to remain creative by giving positive feedback to their work.

 

Online Learning – Moving towards Individualized Instruction

I can remember the time I spent with my grandmother in a library researching our family genology.  We looked through the records like detectives searching for clues.  My grandmother was a resource as I searched and sought out the answers to the mysteries of our family tree.  But the research was mine.  I pushed my way through rolls of microfiche searching for a birth record, a death record, a census, always in search of clues.  If I had questions or wanted to test my answers, I only had to wander to some giant stack of microfiche and ask the expert what she thought of what I was doing.

Having somone available to help guide me through the learning process has been a constant reminder to me as an educator of the kind of teacher I am trying to be.  Trying to reach each kid individually is difficult in the constrains of classrooms and class periods.  Opening up learning to become a 24/7 enterprise new technology is pushing education towards a combination of online learning and classroom learning.  They are calling it blended learning.

I have taken graduate classes online and have been generally happy with the results, although some classes are more adaptable to the online experience than others.  I have taken online classes in the past and there are times when you reach a wall, especially with some types of classes where you need face-to-face interaction to get the kind of feedback and instruction that you need.  When these momments arise, being stuck at a terminal is terminal.  

Blended learning seeks to combine the access and ease of online learning with other types of instructional interaction.  I think in the future this type of instructional process will give us the flexiblity at the high school level to allow kids to specialize and take more challenging classes while still being a part of the high school student body.

Created by Knewton and Column Five Media

Connecting Community: Appalshop

One of the great examples of connecting community in our area of Eastern Kentucky is Appalshop. They are a non-profit that produces multi-media projects that explore life in Appalachia.  Their goal is to give a voice to the area.  I’m a big fan of what they are doing and think that we can incorporate what they are doing in our local schools as a way of showing students the social value of where they are from.

 

Connecting Community: Southern Foodways Alliance

The Southern Foodways Alliance is connecting community at dinner table.  Through shared food, recipes, oral hisotries, documentaries and more.  The Southern Foodways Alliance looks to engage comunity through the culture of food and cooking.  There are many great films, events, and books about the regional cooking of the South.

I would love to get them to bring their film festival to our town and combine it with a farmer’s market and “home cooking” expo where we can collaborate with them and show the great regional cooking taking place in our area.  

Think about supporting SFA or buying some of their great products.  We own the cookbook!

Making All Education Special

I work at a Day Treatment Facility and we deal with a lot of kids that fall into what would be considered the bottom tier of education.  Kids that have social and emotional problems and almost all of whom also have academic problems.  The kids I teach have issues, all of them.  If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be here.  Some need more attention than others, but they all need to have treatment.  It is built into what we do.   In a recent article they talk about this type of education as “alternative”.  Research is pointing to individualized, personalized instruction with low student-teacher ratio as being a key for improving the dropout rate.  When you think about prep schools and some colleges, those things are part of their process. 

Mentors, advisors, small upper-level courses all promote a sense of community and understanding of the importance of the educational process.  Here at the Day Treatment, individualized educational plans allow students to find their way and work through their issues.  Some do so faster than others.  Still others need even more interventions and time to find their way.  If we look at the educational process as a journey and not a race we might better understand what the real needs of our in-need students are.  We should be trying to create life-long learners, kids that are engaged and excited about learning the opportunities for growth that come with it, rather than place so much emphasis on their test scores.

 

Bayfront Alternative Education Program  “The ECSD Alternative Education Program is a collaboration between the Erie City School District, Sarah A. Reed Children’s Center, and the Bayfront Center for Maritime Studies.  The program is a blend of traditional academic curriculum combined with maritime hands-on educational projects and activities aligned with the PA Department of Education standards. The Program also provides an on-site outpatient therapist for providing assessments, evaluations, and therapy (with parental consent).  Therapeutic staff provide professional direction and support for the students and successfully work toward the goal of returning  students to their home school within the Erie City School District.”  Doesn’t this sound like an educational program you’d want your child to be in? 

 

Sir Ken Robinson, an educational reformer, feels that it is only through student-centered education will we answer some of the questions of why kids drop-out.  When we look to pay to send kids to college we look for student-centered liberal arts programs.  Those programs have typically in the past produced or best and brightest, if we are going to reform our educational system why shouldn’t we look to build the same models in our public education that we are willing to pay for in our private education? 

 

The Importance of Community in Education

Public schools by their very natures are diverse places.  Diversity can be in socioeconomics or cultural.  Problems with diversity can lead to prejudices and discrimination within the school.  Educational leaders must seek to create environments that embrace and encourage diversity and allow for diverse views and within the school.  The nurturing relationship within the schools allows for the community to express its true identity and develop and coordinate programs that promote the true self of the school.  Creating educational partnerships allows for the child to be surrounded by not only the family, school, and the district, but also the community and many organizations in the community. 

            In order to develop programs that make a difference in the school, family and community administrators can look to the necessity of developing six major types involvement.  The six types are parenting, communicating, volunteering, learning at home, decision making, and collaborating with community.

            Bringing the community into our schools is so important.  Creating a learning community of teachers, parents and a community that cares about the education and achievement of its children is what schools really need to be focused on.  In the high stakes world of testing I think our educational system will only see real improvement when we start focusing on how our children fit into society as people rather than as test results. 

Creating a community that is focused on our kids allows for greater accountability among all parties involved in the educational process.  Many educators will say that parents don’t help their kids to learn so when the go home the learning stops.  The child then comes back to school not having done their homework or completed the assignment right.  I think we need to really look at helping parents teach their kids, by giving them the tools to assist their children.  I heard some grandparents on NPR in Detroit talk about how they can’t help their grandchildren in math, but they know math is important.  We need to look at educating our society not just our kids.  Many of those kids who fell through the cracks of our educational system now have children or grandchildren in our educational system.  I think we need to look at trying to bring them back to help them and their children.  Creating a community of lifelong learners shows our students we value education as a society more than say, sports or entertainment.  If our communities make learning an important part of their lives then the test results will follow.

            Typically, those kids who test better come from families who take education seriously and hold their children accountable for their education.  Many of them are lifelong learners themselves or have attained higher educational degrees and understand the importance of education.  Still others don’t have the higher education that one would expect, but they place a value on education in their homes.  There is an accountability at home for that child.  I think this is where our educational change must really start, at home.  By building community relations we can hope to develop lifelong learners in our community who have the same goals and desires about education that we do as educators.