Thriving Together: Connecting Rural School Improvement and Community Development

Introduction

What Do We Mean by “Integrated School Improvement–Community Development”?

By this mouthful of a term, we mean more than a partnership between a school and some element within the surrounding locale. We do mean a partnership--but one that directly benefits both the school and the community. When the members of such a partnership set their goals, they look at both sides of this equation. Most strategies for joint school/community development fit into one of three major categories identified by rural education expert Bruce A. Miller. (“The role of rural schools in community development: Policy issues and implications.” Journal of Research in Rural Education, Vol. 11, No. 3, 1995, pp. 163-172.) His three categories serve as the organizing principle for the "nuts and bolts" chapters of this guide:

The school as a community center involves rural schools serving "as both a resource for lifelong learning and as a vehicle for the delivery of a wide range of services" (p. 5). Activities include such things as making school facilities available to local residents for events after school hours, or starting adult education classes or a community health clinic on the school grounds.

The community as curriculum puts students into the community to perform services that are linked to students' academic work, or to help document local history and culture. This approach, Miller says, emphasizes "the study of community in all its various dimensions" (p. 6).

School-based enterprise "places a major emphasis on developing entrepreneurial skills whereby students not only identify potential service needs in their rural communities, but actually establish a business to address those needs" (p. 6). Students learn valuable business skills, the community obtains needed products or services, and the local economy gets a boost. School-based enterprise also includes other school-to-work initiatives.

Purpose of the guide

This resource guide is designed to help rural schools and communities to learn ways of supporting each other so that both can thrive. By working together, schools and their surrounding locales can:

improve student motivation and achievement,
strengthen the bond between students and the communities in which they live,
build students' capacity to be good citizens as well as good workers, and
strengthen community resources, both social and physical.

Who it's for.

Thriving Together is intended to help people from rural schools and communities who want to help themselves. You may be a teacher or principal, a parent or small business owner, a school board member, even a student. Whatever your role or position, if you possess:

an understanding that rural schools and rural communities need each other in order to thrive,
a sense that your neighbors might be willing to try some new things in order to get ahead,
a sense that students, when properly challenged, can accomplish a lot more than most folks think, and
the willingness to work long and hard and to be patient in expecting results--

then this guide is for you.

Its contents.

This guide attempts to give you the background information and basic tools you need to get started with a joint school-community development effort. Chapters address:

why such efforts are worthwhile, how they can strengthen both school and community, and whether your area needs a development project (Chapter 2, Why Bother?),
some of the basic resources and characteristics communities need to succeed in this work, with an informal inventory of your school and community's readiness (Chapter 3, What It Takes),
ways of using collaborative tools to improve your project's odds of success (Chapter 4, A Team Approach to Making Things Happen),
types of projects that have been successful, with ideas and information you can adapt to fit local needs (Chapters 5-7, Nuts and Bolts),
issues and concerns you'll likely need to address (Chapter 8, Cautions and Concerns), and
people, organizations, materials, and Internet sites that can help you in your efforts (Chapter 9, Resources).

Overall, the guide offers four things: motivation, ideas, planning tools, and links to other resources. If you're starting from scratch, you may need all these items. If you've been at this for awhile, you may need only a new idea or two, or a few names and phone numbers. The guide is organized so that users can easily dip in and out, or move step-by-step through the entire process. Materials include:

background narrative, helpful in familiarizing yourself with new concepts and terms, and in bolstering your "pitch" to other key players in the community,
fact sheets, with statistics and other research-based information that can support your cause,
planning tools, from project ideas to checklists to sample forms and procedures,
real-world examples, to help bring abstract ideas to life,
references for further reading, and
resources, organizations and individuals who can offer help or materials.

Its philosophy.

The material in this guide reflects a particular set of basic beliefs. These beliefs, which have to do with the nature of learning, of community, of collaboration, and of change, are summarized below.

Its context.

This guide is a companion to another resource guide, Creating Collaborative Action Teams: Working Together for Student Success. Both have been developed through a project at the Southwest Educational Development Laboratory (SEDL), which provides services and materials to educators in Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas.

The project focuses on strategies for collaborative work that can help school-community partnerships to make significant, long-term contributions to both community and school. SEDL has worked with a number of school sites--rural, urban, and suburban--to establish Collaborative Action Teams composed of school staff, parents, students, and community members. The two resource guides draw from SEDL's experience with these local sites, as well as from the literature on collaboration and school-community partnerships.

The Creating Collaborative Action Teams Guide is designed for use by all schools; it focuses entirely on the collaborative process and ways of making it work effectively. This guide, aimed specifically at rural schools and communities, draws some of its material from the broader resource guide. But it also includes a focus on specific project approaches that have helped rural schools and communities to cope with problems common in rural areas. Although Thriving Together contains material that can be used by almost any school, it is based on the presumption that there are differences in the strengths, weaknesses, challenges, and opportunities with which rural and urban schools and communities must cope.

The developers of this resource guide believe that the future of rural schools is inextricably linked to the future of their surrounding communities. In many ways, perhaps, rural areas are fortunate that their interdependence is so clearly visible. For in the larger scheme of things, all schools must look to the community to help students emerge as good citizens. As the visionary educator Joseph K. Hart stated back in 1924,

The democratic problem in education is not primarily a problem of training children: It is a problem of making a community in which children cannot help growing up to be democratic, intelligent, disciplined to freedom, reverent of the goods of life and eager to share in the tasks of the age. A school cannot produce this result; nothing but a community can do so. (p. 22. Quoted in Edwin C. Nelson, “Community/school revitalization: Joining rural schools and towns together to empower young people and enhance their sense of belonging.” Small Town, September-October, 1995.)

Statement of Beliefs about Effective School–Community Development Projects

Learning is an active, not a passive, process. Students learn best when they are engaged in solving problems that are meaningful to them, and when they have opportunities to talk about, and reflect on, what they are learning.

The purpose of schooling is to help students find productive roles as citizens within their local community, as well as members of the workforce.

One of the biggest problems we face today is that young people have been separated from the tasks and relationships that give purpose to adult lives. School, family, and community must work together to mend these broken links. While many schools and communities share some common characteristics, every place is unique. Local problems require local solutions, and those solutions must reflect local values and have broad community support.

A community is not a community if it cannot embrace all of its members. Factions and groups must learn that they can work together for common good without sacrificing their identity or integrity.

Though working as a group can seem slower and more cumbersome than just pitching in there and getting things done, a collaborative effort is almost always stronger and more enduring. There are tools and processes that can make working as a group less frustrating and more effective.

Change, when you're working toward it, is excruciatingly slow. But if you sit back and wait for change to happen to you, it often comes swiftly, and in ways you never imagined or wanted.

Next Page: Why Bother?