Residency 2 Discussion Prompt

Chapter 3

Boundary-Crossing Leadership for Community Schools

Martin Blank

John Gardner’s (1993) call for boundary-crossing leadership has become more resonant in many different sectors in the more than twenty years since it was first written: “In a tumultuous, swiftly changing environment, in a world of multiple colliding systems, the hierarchical position of leaders within their own system is of limited value because some of the critical tacks require lateral leadership—boundary crossing leadership—involving groups over whom they have no control” (p. 98). His approach has emerged slowly in the education space, which led many schools to focus narrowly on academic achievement under the No Child Left Behind Act.

The new Elementary and Second Education Act, now labeled Every Student Succeeds Act, changes the accountability equation. States are now required to include at least one measure that goes beyond academics in their accountability frameworks. Possibilities include student engagement, educator engagement, school climate/safety, or students’ opportunity to learn.

This is a welcome development for educators, advocates, community leaders, and community partners who believe that closing the opportunity gap and addressing inequities in students’ lives are essential to closing the achievement gap. The realities of young people’s lives bear out the need to broaden the way leaders think and act as they seek to prepare our young people to thrive in the twenty-first century.

Poor children and children of color experience higher rates of chronic absence and lower levels of third-grade reading scores (Chang & Romero, 2008). There are significant disparities in rates of suspension and expulsion for this group (Losen & Skiba, 2010), as well as correlations between academic performance and vision problems, asthma, teen pregnancy, aggression, and violence. Moreover, research shows that low-income families can afford to spend far less on offering enrichment experiences to their children (Duncan & Murnane, 2014). Beyond this we know that toxic stress and the sense of isolation that comes from growing up in racially and economically segregated neighborhoods influence student success.

All of this is true at a time when we have a student population that is more than 50 percent poor and increasingly diverse, with the percentage of English language learners continuing to grow (Southern Education Foundation, 2015). The number of languages spoken and cultures present in public schools continue to challenge a predominantly white teacher workforce.

All of these challenges walk through the schoolhouse door each day, but schools today have neither the expertise nor resources to address them. Their leaders must, as John Gardner urged, become boundary-crossing leaders—leaders who reach out and build deep, intentional, and sustained partnerships with other organizations over which they have no control. Why? To get the results our nation seeks for its young people.

There are more than 150 school districts implementing the community school strategy. They cut across the nation, from New York to Chicago; from Evansville to Lincoln to Salt Lake, and in Oakland, San Francisco, and Hayward, California. Small, medium, and large districts are in the mix. Building on the experience of the past twenty years, the potential for growth is significant, particularly with a new law that opens up additional flexibility for local school districts.

What is the vision for a community school that has such relationships? How are leaders organizing themselves to guide the development and implementation of community schools? And finally, what is the know-how that school leaders need to lead community schools, and how do we get the leaders we need? This chapter begins to answer some of these questions.

THE COMMUNITY SCHOOL: A PARTNERSHIP-DRIVEN VISION FOR OUR PUBLIC SCHOOLS

Since 1997, the Coalition for Community Schools has advocated for schools as centers of flourishing communities where everyone belongs, works together, and thrives. We define a community school as both a place and a set of partnerships between the school and other community resources. It has an integrated focus on academics, health and social services, youth and community development, and community engagement that leads to improved student learning, stronger families and healthier communities.

Community schools seek to create the conditions necessary for children and youth to learn. Consider these “conditions for learning” taken from the Coalition for Community Schools (2005):

· Early childhood development is fostered through high-quality, comprehensive programs that nurture learning and development.

· The school has a core instructional program with qualified teachers, a challenging curriculum, and high standards and expectations for students.

· Students are motivated and engaged in learning—both in school and in community settings—during and after school.

· The basic physical, mental, and emotional health needs of young people and their families are recognized and addressed.

· There is mutual respect and effective collaboration among parents, families, and school staff.

· Community engagement, together with school efforts, promotes a school climate that is safe, supportive, and respectful and connects students to a broader learning community.

From a community school perspective, fulfilling these conditions requires deep, respectful, and purposeful relationships among educators, families, and community partners. Local government, higher education institutions, United Ways, community-based organizations, and neighborhood and faith-based groups all have important contributions to make.

These partnerships ultimately help build and integrate three common elements of a community school: (1) health and social supports for students and families, often called wraparound services; (2) authentic family and community engagement; and (3) expanded learning opportunities inside and outside the school that support the core curriculum and enrich students’ learning experiences. For school and community leaders, community schools are not a “silver bullet” but rather are a strategy for developing collective trust, action, and impact.

In Our Kids, Robert Putnam (2015) suggests that America no longer sees itself as having shared responsibility for the education of all its children. Community schools are an antidote to that attitude.

Results-focused partnerships are the foundation for community schools. Local leadership typically focuses on broad results that matter to multiple stakeholders. Here is a list of broad results that community schools seek:

· Children are ready to enter school

· Students attend school consistently

· Students are actively engaged in learning and in their community

· Families are increasingly involved in their children’s education

· Students are healthy—physically, socially, and emotionally

· Students live and learn in safe, supportive, and stable environments

· Communities are desirable places to live

· Students graduate ready for college, career, and citizenship

A careful analysis of each result, and the related indicators for measuring progress, makes clear that schools need their community to move the needle on specific issues. For example, chronic absence is not just a school issue; its cause is often embedded in health and family issues. Making sure students are healthy often entails relationships with health and mental health organizations. And a focus on student engagement might involve partnerships with arts and cultural institutions, museums, or environmental and hunger groups among others.

BOUNDARY-CROSSING LEADERSHIP STRUCTURES

At the community or school district level, networks of boundary-crossing leaders such as superintendents, elected officials, United Ways, local government, higher education institutions, health systems, community-based organizations, and other community partners work together to drive the community school vision forward. In addition to communicating a shared vision, these groups are responsible for developing supportive policy, mobilizing and aligning community resources, and outlining accountability plans to build and sustain a system of community schools. Put differently, the job of a community leadership group is to create the conditions for educators and their partners to help young people thrive.

Superintendents and central office personnel often interact with leaders of other major community institutions on a formal or informal basis. For school leaders the challenge is to turn a board role or an informal relationship into a strategic partnership with organizations they do not control.

Consider United Ways, whose national goals of improving health, education, and incomes fit well with the community school strategy (United Way, 2015). The United Way of Salt Lake, for example, is a major driver of community schools in its region. A growing number of higher education institutions are engaging in university-assisted community schools which bring the assets of a university or college together to support nearby public schools.

In the local government sector, cities and counties are increasingly becoming involved with community schools. New initiatives are emerging in Newark and Philadelphia, and New York City is financing a major expansion. An exemplary county is Multnomah County, Oregon, which, in partnership with the city of Portland and six participating school districts, is now organizing 81 SUN Community Schools (School Uniting Neighborhoods).

A strong community leadership group at the district or city level ensures that community schools are aligned with the district’s vision for better learning and student success. Superintendents are important participants in these groups, but they need not necessarily be in charge. By giving greater public roles to community partners, within the parameters of a shared vision, school leaders can better influence gathering community assets to support critical education outcomes. Established relationships are ideally turned into formal agreements enabling partners to hold each other accountable and help avoid miscommunication about respective roles, resource sharing, and program quality and effectiveness.

The school-site leadership team, another boundary-crossing leadership structure, is important at the school level. Schools often have community partners, but in too many cases no agreed-upon strategy or set of desired results. Partners run programs that are good for students but not intentionally linked to the core mission of the school. A strong site leadership team addresses this challenge.

Principals, teachers, and other school staff work together with parents and community partners to develop a strategy for their school through the site leadership team. They are responsible for needs assessment, planning, and implementation, as well as the alignment of educators and partners toward a common set of results and communicating with the broader school community. The team incorporates partners’ assets into the school-wide plan and advocates for outstanding assets.

This team need not be a new committee. Existing school groups now focused on school decision making, student support, health, or other issues could take a broader role. What is essential is that educators, families, and community partners have a venue for thinking together about the results they want for their children and that they continuously review their efforts in order to improve quality and enhance impact.

A community resource coordinator is a key dimension of the community school strategy. Also referred to as resource coordinator, community school director, or site manager, the community resource coordinator is a new leadership role in our public schools. This individual serves as the bridge between the school and the community, facilitating the work of the site leadership team, leveraging community partners, and integrating their assets and expertise into the life of the school.

The coordinator job demands an individual whose skills cross many disciplinary boundaries—part social worker, community development and organizing specialist, educator, and planner. Hiring a coordinator from a partner organization demonstrates the school’s commitment to tapping local expertise. A coordinator serving on the school leadership team ensures that community resources are fully part of the conversation and add the most value to the school.

Across the country various funding sources feed into community school coordinator costs: local school funds, federal and state grants, foundation and community partner funds. Research and experience suggest that once principals have the support a community coordinator brings to their school, they find resources in their own budget to cover the costs. Diversified funding in community schools leverages a return on district dollars invested at a ratio of at least 3:1 (Blank, 2010). Other principals have generated totals over $10 and as high as $20 (Martinez & Hayes, 2013).

Gluing together the work of the community school leadership team and the school site groups is an intermediary. This entity keeps the whole enterprise moving. It may be an organization, a school district, United Way, city, or higher education institute. It often includes a working group composed of key managers from partner agencies. The intermediary provides planning, coordination, and management support, facilitates communication among community-wide and school-site leaders, and works to measure progress. Central office school district staff often participate in these intermediary efforts since they are best able to help community partners understand how the school systems function, work through specific issues, and recommend changes in the school district that might make partnership with the community easier; these may include data sharing, security, and custodial issues. These cross-boundary leadership structures unite and mobilize community assets for the community school.

Here are some good examples of how boundary-crossing leadership results in innovative school environments.

Community Learning Centers, Cincinnati, Ohio

Recognizing the fundamental connections among student health, readiness to learn, and academic achievement, Cincinnati’s Community Learning Centers (CLCs) partner with the Cincinnati Health Department through the Growing Well Health Collaborative to coordinate school-based health services. There are thirty-five CLCs with a resource coordinator in each school. Cincinnati Public Schools, the Greater Cincinnati United Way, and local foundations provide leadership for the effort with support from the Community Learning Centers Institute, local intermediary groups, and district staff. One of their CLCs, Oyler School, has received national attention for building one of the largest CLCs. It includes a school-based health center providing primary, dental, and vision care, an Early Learning Center, and a community mental health provider.

Schools Uniting Neighborhoods, Multnomah County, Oregon

Results-focused partnerships are essential to the community school strategy in Multnomah County, Oregon. The countywide Schools Uniting Neighborhoods (SUN) initiative includes eighty-five community schools across six districts, each with a lead community partner. The SUN Coordinating Council, including leadership from the county, the city of Portland, a major funding partner, and six participating districts, drives the SUN schools. SUN’s intermediary, the county human services department, ensures that all partners and schools are collaborating toward results through annual plans specifying how they will work together to increase learning opportunities, implement strategies that promote better attendance, and provide health and other services to students and families. In their agreement partners must describe which strategies they will employ to boost reading, math, writing, or attendance, as well as what indicators they will use to measure progress. These plans are required by contractual agreements at multiple levels signed by the intermediary, school district, principal, and lead partner agency.

Learning Partnerships in Practice, Albuquerque, New Mexico

Albuquerque’s Community Schools Partnership is a unique arrangement between the Albuquerque Public Schools, the city of Albuquerque, and Bernalillo County. This partnership invested in a director for community schools who reports to a leadership board including these partners and members of the business and nonprofit communities. There are now twenty-three community schools in Albuquerque. One special program to get parents into the school and supporting their child’s learning is Homework Diners. The idea is simple: offer parents an opportunity to come into the physical school building and work with teachers and community partners on what children are learning in the classrooms, while eating a provided dinner. Parents connect with teachers in an informal way and check on their student’s progress. Children see how much parents care about their learning, and parents have the supports on-site to help them help their children.

United Way of Salt Lake, Salt Lake City, Utah

The Granite School District is one of four that are part of United Way of Salt Lake’s Promise Partnership Community School Initiative using community schools as the vehicle. The United Way of Salt Lake organized its community schools within specific communities, using the Promise Neighborhood Initiative as a model.

The Collective Impact approach created far-reaching, systemic change that supports and is bolstered by the work on the ground. The cradle-to-career framework also meant that United Way would refocus its efforts on developing a pipeline of services in specific communities—combining the strengths of the community school strategy with a place-based initiative. United Way employs school directors (community school coordinators) who are considered key members of the school leadership. In addition to monthly meetings with partners, the directors convene biweekly. They also have pipeline meetings to examine data on students transitioning between schools and focus on how services can follow them. This continuity is exemplified by the mobile health clinic that Utah Partners for Health brings to participating schools. The medical staff provide checkups, women’s health exams, and primary health care to uninsured and underinsured families.

A Promise Partnership Regional Council guides the initiative and focuses on keeping the work aligned. It formed in 2014 and includes education, business, government, and nonprofit leaders. Collaborative Action Networks have also been formed to organize the work and bring partners together around specific goals. Convening around a desired result—such as improving third-grade reading scores or increasing the percentage of high school students who are college ready—is different than convening around a program or a funding stream and unites providers who otherwise never work together.

WHAT LEADERS FOR COMMUNITY SCHOOLS NEED TO BE ABLE TO DO

Most of the recent literature on school leadership focuses on management and technical aspects and instructional leadership. While important, that skill set may not be at the heart of school leadership requirements.

John Gardner shared a set of leadership attributes that continues to resonate. With a constituency that includes students, parents and families, civic and business leaders, teachers, paraprofessionals, community partners, faith-based and community-based groups, and volunteers, a school leader guiding a community school must think and act more like a leader in the broadest sense. Eight of those attributes reflect particular responsibilities relevant to school leaders (Gardner, 1993, chapter 5):

· Intelligence and judgment—in action. School leaders must not only be knowledgeable and smart, they must all be able to act in a thoughtful way. 

· Understanding of follower constituents and their needs. School leaders must understand the various constituencies with whom they work—their teachers, paraprofessionals, family, community partners and students.

· Working with diverse groups. The demographic changes in the country demand school leaders who are comfortable moving in different cultures and are able to listen and understand the different perspective that people bring.

· Knowledge of other systems and institutions. To tap the assets and expertise of other groups, school leaders should understand their mandates and interests and how they connect with the mission of public schools.

· Skill in dealing with people. For school leaders this means having the social and emotional skills needed to appraise accurately the readiness or resistance of followers to move in a given direction and to know when discussion or confusion is undermining the group’s will to act.

· Capacity to motivate. This idea is at the heart of the popular notion of leadership, and school leaders must have the ability to move the entire school community to action and results.

· Courage, resolution, steadiness. School leaders need courage and the ability to risk again and again in order to help young people succeed.

· Adaptability and flexibility. The problems that come to the door of our public schools demand leaders who can adapt to an ever-changing environment and shift quickly from a failing tactic to another approach.

· Physical vitality and stamina. Oft overlooked, this quality will surely resonate with school leaders who have long days, including weekends, with challenging issues and difficult decisions that tax them physically and emotionally.

The broad attributes of leadership must of course be melded with the unique knowledge and skills needed to lead and work in a public school environment. The 2015 Professional Standards for Educational Leadership are a valuable step forward, reflecting more specifically on characteristics of a school leader. The Standards focus on equity and cultural responsiveness, community of care and support for students, and meaningful family and community engagement.

Combining Gardner’s attributes with these new standards offers real promise for developing the kinds of boundary-crossing leaders we need for community schools. But for community schools to work, leadership development must not only focus on principals, but on teachers, community school coordinators, professionals in related fields, and parent leaders too.

Teachers generally say they learned a little about working with families and next to nothing about the community during their training. Given the research on the importance of family engagement in the education of children (e.g., Henderson & Mapp, 2002) and the Dual Capacity Building Framework for Family School Partnerships issued by the Department of Education (Mapp & Kuttner, 2013), this is indeed short-sighted. The new Every Student Succeeds Act includes an emphasis in this area for teachers as well as principals and must be mined.

We also need institutions of higher education to initiate programs training community school coordinators. Such a curriculum would integrate knowledge from education, social work, and community organizing, youth development, and strategic planning and management. This level of professional preparation is essential to grow the thousands of necessary community school coordinators. Right now local initiatives are preparing their own staff through in-service training or through relationships with technical assistance groups such as the National Center for Community Schools. This is required but not sufficient. We need far more interdisciplinary programs to prepare people to bridge schools and communities. The University of Chicago School of Social Services Administration Leadership in Community Schools Program has been a leader in this regard.

Interdisciplinary preparation for individuals entering specific professional occupations is needed as well. Future professionals in the fields of health, counseling, social work, criminal justice, and education now rarely have shared experiences during their professional preparation. Yet they will often interact on the job, and particularly in community schools. Joint classes and experiences that help people develop a shared language and understanding of the culture of different systems, and what good interdisciplinary practice looks like in a real school setting, would set the stage for more and better collaboration to support students.

Everyone can be a leader in a community school, and this proposition must include parents and families. Their voices are vital in community schools if family and community engagement is to be robust. A United Parent Leadership Network began to emerge in 2015 for this purpose in addition to community organizing groups such as the Journey for Justice and the NYC Coalition for Education Justice.

A FINAL THOUGHT

Leadership is an essential asset if our public schools are to succeed and our young people to thrive. From a community school perspective, the leadership of the principal is vital, but leaders from across the community and throughout the school are needed. In today’s complex world—a world that has only become more challenging since Gardner first wrote about boundary-crossing leaders in 1993, it is even clearer that no single leader, no single institution can get the results it seeks alone. The movement for community schools is growing. It needs more leaders willing and able to work together for the benefit of our children, our schools, and our democracy.

Chapter 4

Leading through Community-Based Partnerships

Chris Brown

When thinking about leadership in community schools, it is important to consider the role the community can, and should, play in the process of this unique education reform model. Relatively small nonprofit organizations, based in low- and moderate-income communities, have demonstrated real commitment to education change and have been playing a more significant role in school reform. They do this by investing their time, money, and leadership in schools in their community.

The Elev8 program in Chicago is one example of this work. Elev8 is an initiative that grew out of support from the Atlantic Philanthropies for an in-schools integrated services program. In 2006, Atlantic wanted to fund a demonstration program that would marry the best practices in out-of-school-time programming with school-based health services and supports for families. Their goal in this effort was to change the life outcomes of middle school students by addressing their needs, and the needs of their families, in the school space.

Many organizations and people helped lead the Elev8 program from conceptualization through implementation, beginning with Atlantic and its decade-long commitment. Foundation staff conceived of the initial program design, followed by a substantial financial commitment to ensure effective implementation of the program. Administrators and educators at the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) and health care managers and providers from community-based health organizations implemented the program and developed partnerships that improved the lives of young people.

This chapter will focus mainly on the specific leadership role played by nonprofit organizations. This is not to diminish the work of others, but to highlight these important players in the school reform movement whose efforts are often overlooked. The chapter offers lessons on how community organizations can design effective programs, negotiate with funders, schools, and others around issues of interest to the community, and oversee program implementation in a variety of environments. It also shows how these organizations help programs in schools weather the changes that inevitably occur in schools and how they muster political will and local accountability to keep programs in place over which they have a sense of ownership. Lastly, the chapter highlights the importance of long-term commitments by funders to programs and the importance of partnerships at the local school level.

BACKGROUND OF ELEV8

Atlantic selected four sites to implement this program: Baltimore, New Mexico (five schools spread around the state), Oakland, and Chicago. In Chicago, they picked the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) Chicago to be the intermediary to spearhead the endeavor. For several years, LISC Chicago had been undertaking the New Communities Program (NCP) to support comprehensive community development. It did this by working with a community-based nonprofit lead agency and supporting the development of a quality-of-life plan for the community.

In 2007, LISC selected five of its lead agencies as partners in the Elev8 program. These lead agencies each selected a middle school in their community and, together, they selected a Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC) as their health provider. LISC facilitated a planning process in each community where 40–120 people came together weekly to plan activities in each of the core program areas.

The lead agencies took responsibility for identifying local leaders who should be a part of the planning. These included staff of the lead agency, principals, teachers, students, parents, social service providers, political leaders, and many others who had a stake in the school. Working with LISC, the lead agencies developed agendas for the meetings, identified key concerns with the effort, led small groups that produced program plans, and worked to develop solutions to problems that arose. 

Early in the process, the lead agencies identified three defects in the Elev8 model. Atlantic had a very specific set of “gold standard” out-of-school-time providers they wanted the sites to use for programming. Atlantic originally insisted that the health centers should be run by university-affiliated health providers and that they could only serve students in the school. The last issue that the lead agencies identified was the need for parent, community, and student engagement to be part of the program.

Atlantic wanted to be sure that they were bringing the best options to middle school students and wanted each site to only implement research-based programs in the schools. The lead agencies reacted against this for two reasons. First, many of the providers did not have the capacity to work in more schools in Chicago. Second, and more importantly, the early Elev8 model did not take into account the context of the schools or the communities. What might work or be needed in one place would not work or be needed in another. The LISC planning process allowed local communities and schools to identify their own assets and needs and to design a program around these.

For example, Reavis was a school with a newer principal and a very new teaching staff that had a lot of turnover. Orozco had a principal who had been on the job for more than a decade, as had many of the teachers. Reavis needed its teaching staff to focus on honing their craft. They used Elev8 funds to help with that and brought in outside providers to run the after-school programs. At Orozco, they needed for the teachers to have more time with students outside the formal classroom so they could build deeper relationships with students, so the teachers ran the vast majority of after-school classes. Orozco is also in a predominately Mexican community that is gentrifying and they wanted to run programming that reinforced families’ culture.

Local partners quickly identified that using a university-affiliated health provider would have an impact on the long-term sustainability of the health centers. These types of providers do not receive the enhanced reimbursement for Medicaid services that FQHCs do; the vast majority of patients rely on Medicaid for health insurance. LISC subsidized the initial operations of the health center, but lead agencies knew this funding would run out. They had to be sure the health centers could sustain themselves on their own.

The lead agencies also pushed back on the student-only policy, saying it would be hard for them to “sell” the health centers in the community if members of the community were denied access to the center. As one community leader put it, “You want me to tell people in our community (a medically underserved neighborhood) that we are building a state of the art health center in their neighborhood, and they can’t use it?” Needless to say, this would not have gone over well. LISC pursued a change in the Chicago zoning code that allowed for an exterior door so that the health centers could see both students and community members

The lead agencies strongly believed that if the program was going to be successful over the long term, the recipients of program services also had to be deeply invested in meaningful ways in the life of the school and the community. Given all the changes that happen in schools, there had to be local political will and accountability that pushed for the program no matter what. To do this, parents, community members, and students had to see themselves as not just passive recipients of services, but as active participants in a vibrant program. Leadership development, arts programming, and educational classes allowed this to happen.

On these points, the local community partners won out. Atlantic agreed that context did matter and allowed local partners to select their own out-of-school-time providers. They agreed to change the model to allow for FQHC providers and for community visits to the health centers. Atlantic also added a fourth pillar to the Elev8 model for parent, community, and student engagement. Today, all of these are recognized as being significant changes and essential elements of the program that helped ensure success over the years.

A successful planning process led to Atlantic Philanthropies providing $18 million in support for implementation in Chicago. At each site, LISC, using funds from Atlantic and other local foundations, provided funding for the lead agency to hire a local program director and other staff, to construct the health centers, to pay for out of school time programs, to provide social supports to students and families, and to hire staff to engage students, parents, and community members in the life of the school.

Today, Elev8 Chicago works in five communities, with five lead agencies, schools, health providers, and other partners (see Table 4.1).

Elev8 Community Partnerships
Community	Lead Agency	School	Health Provider
Auburn Gresham	Greater Auburn Gresham Development Corporation (GADC)	Perspectives Calumet Academy	UIC health systems (The health center was originally run by ACCESS Community health, which pulled out in 2014.)
Chicago Lawn	Southwest Organizing Project (SWOP)	Marquette School of Excellence	Esperanza Health Services (The health center was originally run by ACCESS Community health, which pulled out in 2013.)
Kenwood	Quad Communities Development Corporation (QCDC)	Reavis Elementary School	Near North Health Services
Logan Square	Logan Square Neighborhood Association (LSNA)	Ames Middle School (In 2015, LSNA moved the program to McAuliffe and Funston Elementary Schools.)	PrimeCare Health Services
Pilsen	The Resurrection Project (TRP)	Orozco Academy	Alivio Medical Center

Over the course of the program, each school site has provided fifteen to thirty-five out-of-school-time options per ten-week session and has served over 3,500 students. The health centers have over eight thousand visits per year and have ensured that all five schools have school physical and immunization compliance rates above 95 percent. Over one thousand parents have participated in leadership development, arts, financial, and personal development programming.

Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago is providing the local evaluation for Elev8 Chicago. They have undertaken an implementation evaluation and are in the process of completing an impact evaluation. So far they have seen small but statistically significant improvements in the attendance and behavior of Elev8 participants versus nonparticipants in the same school. They will soon have information comparing students in Elev8 schools to non-Elev8 schools; how well Elev8 participants succeed when they move to high school, and whether use of the health center improves student outcomes.

ADDRESSING CHALLENGES IN IMPLEMENTATION

All of this work has not come without challenges. Perhaps the biggest is the amount of turnover in the school system. Since planning began in 2007, the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) has had six CEOs, the Elev8 schools have had 100 percent principal turnover (in one case the school is on its fifth principal), 50–100 percent turnover of teachers depending on the school, and two schools have been repurposed—one as a turnaround with Academy for School Leadership (AUSL) and another converted into a military academy, and because of the nature of the program, a complete turnover of the student body twice.

Given this, someone has to provide stability if the program is going to be successful. The community-based lead agencies play this role. During this same period, there has been no change in the executive directors of the five lead agencies. Four of the five Elev8 directors have only turned over once, and the other one has turned over three times. In three of these five cases, the previous director took another position within the organization and is still connected with the program.

Through their stability, the lead agencies provide leadership to the education efforts in the school. They have built lasting relationships with parents and students that transcend turnover at the schools. Often, students are looking for Elev8 staff when the school year starts because they don’t know any of the school staff. The Elev8 staff helps them weather the stormy period that often happens when new teachers and principals take over a school.

The lead agencies also have provided the political will and accountability to keep the program going in a way that an inside-the-system person or an outside-the-community organization could not. Because these organizations are deeply rooted in their community they have lots of political capital they can use to implement their will. Often when a new principal comes in to a school, they have their ideas about what can and should be done in the building. While the groups do not presume to tell them how to run the academic program of the school, they do remind them of commitments and investments made in the community school program of Elev8.

In each of the cases above when turnover happened, Elev8 could have been lost at the school. This happened in schools in Elev8 New Mexico. A new principal came in, wanted to move the school in a different direction, and booted out the Elev8 program. There was no on-the-ground community partner there to ensure a successful transition of the program. In Chicago, in each case where a new principal has transitioned into a school, the Elev8 community-based lead agency was there to help them with their transition and to also ensure that the program stayed in place and continued to deliver services and programming much as it had in the past.

Another key challenge that the lead agencies addressed was the siloed nature of schoolwork and social service delivery. Principals are evaluated on improving test scores. Health center directors are judged on how many patients they saw and after-school providers on how many children attend their program. While they may all agree that working together is in their best long-term interest, it is hard to do this when there are so many short-term pressures.

STRUCTURING COMMUNITY COLLABORATION

The lead agencies provide both the space and the time as well as the political cover to allow for collaboration. The lead agencies all have relationships that go beyond just the school building. They know the principal’s boss and the CEO of the FQHC. The lead agencies and/or LISC have relationships with school board members and senior leaders at CPS. At times when the principals feel pressed, the lead agency can open up space for them to work on Elev8. The reverse is also true in that the executive directors at times have used their relationships with others to get the principals to pay attention to Elev8 when they have drifted to other issues.

LISC Chicago often describes the lead agencies as the glue that holds the Elev8 program together in the school. The Elev8 director is the one person in the school who is paid to get people to work together and whose evaluation is based on how well they do this. The directors convene meetings, monthly or quarterly, with academic staff, health providers, after-school providers, and others to be sure that everyone is working together on Elev8 goals. They use these meetings to identify and solve problems, make long-term plans for collaboration, and follow through on implementation to the benefit of students.

The current academic performance measures also provide a challenge. Everyone knows that arts, sports, cooking, gardening, and a whole wide range of other programs are important to build well-rounded students. But because of budget cuts and a focus on accountability measures that only look at reading and math test scores, many of the enrichment programs that richer school districts offer are not available in the Elev8 schools. The community groups led the way in insisting that the kids in these schools have options that go beyond just basic education.

The Elev8 program provided the funding to make up for budget cuts. The lead agencies pushed to ensure that the schools looked at other measures of success. These included demonstrating competency in the arts. After each ten-week session, the Elev8 program organized a showcase where students could show off what they learned in their classes. This was also a great way to bring parents, community members, and others into the school building.

The lead agencies also promoted social emotional learning. Depending on the school, they did this with peace circles, peer juries, calm classroom practices, and group and individual counseling sessions.

The Elev8 program offered lots of opportunities to learn about keys to success of a community school program. These relate to relationship building by the lead agency, integration of the work, and the staffing of the program.

As with many things in life, community schools often were about who you know, not what you know. The community-based lead agencies were very effective in building relationships and partnerships with a wide variety of people and organizations to implement the Elev8 program. They worked closely with principals and leaders of the FQHCs to identify shared interests and then to act on that knowledge. They were very good at bringing in outside partners and helping them navigate the school system—getting security background checks, understanding the school day schedule, and getting paid. They also developed strong and deep relationships with students and families, often around noneducational or school issues, that allowed them to understand what families needed, but also what they had to offer the program. School staff could not have done this because they did not have the staff or the time to do this relationship building.

Because they had these relationships with all these different partners, the lead agencies were able to promote the integration of programs. Since the lead agencies were not pressed by short-term concerns such as annual test score increases or patient visit requirements, they were able to focus on longer-term goals for students’ development. The lead agencies acted as the glue holding the Elev8 program together at the local level. They convened meetings, collected and disseminated data, identified roadblocks and solutions, cajoled and pushed partners some times and provided political cover for staff when needed at other times, and consistently reconnected people to the plan they had made and agreed to.

The program provided for a number of staff people to help carry out this work. A key agreement early on was that most of the staff, and the program director in particular, would be employees of the lead agency. While they were housed at the school and worked closely with school staff, they answered to the executive director of the community partner, rather than the principal. While the principal was a key player in the implementation of the program, everyone realized that schools are chronically understaffed and that any additional staff, such as an Elev8 program director, would be moved around to plug holes in the school staffing plan. By having the director and their staff report to the lead agency, they could avoid having staff “drift” from the program.

Marquette School of Excellence offers a good case study in how all this community leadership played out. Marquette is located in the Chicago Lawn community on Chicago’s southwest side. The school is a large one and almost exactly half African American and half Latino. The Southwest Organizing Project selected Marquette in 2007 as their Elev8 partner. It had been one of three original community schools in Chicago funded by the Polk Bros. Foundation and Metropolitan Family Services (MFS) was still working in the school, mostly with younger children. Elev8 offered an opportunity to bring more programing to the older students and their families.

SWOP led a planning process at the school in 2007 that included about 120 people; from the principal and teachers to students and parents to local service organizations and MFS. The program began implementation in 2008 and was focused on converting the middle grades program into an International Baccalaureate curriculum with a strong, supporting after-school component.

While the program did good work and provided needed services and opportunities to students and families, it was not enough to turn around the academic performance of the school. In 2012, Marquette was targeted for turnaround, meaning all the teachers would be released and a new administration would be brought in. At about the same time, ACCESS, the FQHC health provider, announced that it would be leaving the school. In most cases, this would have been the end of the community school program as a new administration coming in under these circumstances would want all “new” things in the building.

SWOP stepped in though and worked closely with AUSL even before it came to the school to help AUSL build connections with local parents and help them understand the turnaround process and to convince AUSL that Elev8 was an important program to the community that needed to be left in place during the turnaround process.

SWOP also worked to bring in a new FQHC partner to run the health center. SWOP identified and recruited Esperanza, an FQHC from Chicago’s Little Village community, to come and run the health center at the school.

As all these new organizations settled into the school, SWOP staff, who were in place before the changes, brought partners together to build relationships and create new plans for Elev8’s work at the school. Today, Elev8 and all the partners—AUSL, Esperanza, and SWOP—are fully integrated into the life of the school and into each other’s work. They meet regularly to plan programs and to target which students most need Elev8 services. They combine funding to pay for behavioral health services. They jointly fund-raise for other school needs. In many ways, they have a much stronger partnership for the Elev8 program than existed before all the transitions. This was all due to SWOP’s leadership in bringing them together.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

Community schools help to integrate schools into the life of a community and vice versa. They create learning opportunities for students and families that are often not available in many schools. They provide resources to school staff and leaders that they might not otherwise have access to. They break down common barriers to education in low- and moderate-income communities.

As the name implies, though, the community must be a big part of community schools if they are to be successful. Elev8 Chicago offers many examples of how community-based lead agencies have played a key role in ensuring the success of these schools. The lead agencies provided leadership in the planning and implementation of the program, they kept the effort going with staff and additional resources, they built partnerships and problem solved, and they held the effort to together when the winds of change could have easily blown the effort apart.