At new school, it takes a community
On a recent morning, Debra Socia, principal of the newly opened New Boston Pilot Middle School in Dorchester, stood before ministers and social service leaders at the Ten Point Coalition's monthly breakfast and invited them to school.
"We want adults from the community in the school, so kids realize their behavior has to be consistently wonderful," she said. "We'd love to have you come at lunch, be in the building, walking the halls, reading to the children, so they understand that we're about their lives beyond the building."
The sparkling new school has a dance studio, theater gym, cafeteria, library, and two art studios -- all of which were requested by the Columbia Road community, Socia said. But beyond the beauty of the space is an opportunity for the school to be a center of community, she believes. Socia recruits adult volunteers to be in the building as much as possible, greeting the 23 buses that arrive every morning, and walking children all or part-way home in the afternoon. There are lunch and library volunteers, as well as two women from the neighborhood who staff the front office.
The 750-student middle school is also working with community agencies to find the funds and staff to run after-school programming--including sports, music and arts clubs, classes for parents, and an outdoor classroom.
Eventually, Socia hopes that the middle school will become a community school, also known as a full-service school. In such schools, teachers can focus on teaching during the school day, because children's other needs are met by partners in the building.
"The idea is to join with schools in meeting their mission," explained Bob Kilkenny, director of the Alliance for Inclusion and Prevention, which works with the New Boston Pilot and the Washington Irving--both public Boston middle schools. "We believe that success in school means success in life."
At least 18 other public schools in the city already are community schools, not counting 33 that have community learning centers on-site, said Bill Kelley, director of program partnerships for the Boston public schools. The partners in these schools this year joined the School Department to found a Full Service Schools Roundtable, with the object of offering services to the remaining 90-odd Boston schools. In five years, roundtable participants hope to allow a third of public schools in the city to be full-service.
Superintendent Thomas Payzant started talking about expanding community schools to include the rest of the system two years ago, Kelley said. The Full Service Roundtable, which includes private organizations like the YMCA as well as state and university partners, is one of only a handful in urban public systems nationally that are coordinating services across districts.
"Boston has always been resource-rich and coordination-poor," Kelley said. "We're trying to overcome that."
So many groups have signed on to the roundtable that its list of volunteer participants and advisers runs two pages. And more are joining, according to Matt LiPuma, director of community partnerships at The Home for Little Wanderers.
Part of the excitement stems from a new study of schools around the country that demonstrates what organizers felt at gut level--that by removing non-academic barriers to learning and increasing parent involvement, student achievement, attendance, social development, and engagement improve.
The roundtable's next challenge is to raise private funds. "So far, this has been done with people's volunteer time," Kelley said.
Roundtable volunteers are applying for roughly $200,000 in grants to cover the cost of full-time staff to build the infrastructure to support old and new community schools, and to build public and private financial support. Last month, the roundtable received a $50,000 grant from the Herman and Frieda L. Miller Foundation.
Nationally there are at least 3,000 full-service schools, according to Martin Blank, director of the Coalition for Community Schools in Washington, D.C.
Probably the best-known Boston full-service school is the Thomas Gardner Elementary School in Allston, which adopted the model in 1997. Through its partners, the Gardner offers before- and after-school tutoring and programs, an on-site pediatrician and nurse, counseling, dental care, and, for parents, ESL, computer, and immigration law classes.
The partners in the Gardner have raised private funds to take what works best there to the entire cluster of 10 elementary schools in Allston-Brighton and Mission Hill, providing a coordinator for every school, building student support teams, and offering after-school programming. They have also put together an instructional support center to meet parents' needs, and help more agencies partner with schools.
According to Mary Walsh, director of the Center for Child, Family & Community School Partnerships at Boston College's Lynch School of Education, outside evaluators are beginning to see a relationship between the number of services offered to children and their scores on standardized tests.
"It's a great way to make maximal use of community resources," Walsh said. Because of the variety of options available with the partnerships, many children do not have to go through a special education evaluation--which costs on average $2,000, and often results in children not being helped because they are not classified as having special needs.
"If you get these children into a positive alternative" to special education, "the savings is huge, and the children don't end up with a label," Walsh noted. In Cluster 5 many children who might have been referred to special education get after-school tutoring, mentoring, or counseling instead. Walsh said that this intervention in grades K-5 often means future cost savings as children move into middle and high school.
The Otis School in East Boston is a community school being assisted by Boston Excels, a 12-year-old program of the Home for Little Wanderers. Excels, which is also based in three other Boston elementary schools, provides parent ESL and parenting courses at the Otis, along with child care. Excels also offers a full-time therapist and coordinator on site.
The Otis community of teachers and counselors encourages parent participation despite a population that speaks more Spanish and Portuguese than English. In 2000, the state Department of Education highlighted the Otis for its improvements in MCAS passing rates, and the superintendent recognized the Otis as one of the system's "exceptionally effective" schools in 2001 and 2003.
"We know that we can work on all the things that positively correlate with success in school," noted LiPuma of The Home for Little Wanderers. "These are easily documented. The difficulty is demonstrating academic achievement."
The results in Boston community schools are replicated in other cities, Blank said.
"This is a move to a more systemic way of providing services; it's a more efficient strategy," he said. Not only is provision of services like doctor's appointments and tutoring at school more convenient for students and parents, it builds community, Blank said.
"The adults in children's lives too often don't talk to each other," he said. "With more community, you have more people watching out for the kids; and when kids see adults doing stuff together, they start to see more possibility--they know more about the broader world."
Kilkenny, of the Alliance for Inclusion and Prevention, agreed.
"This is the way all schools will be in the 21st century," he said.
