Connecting Schools, Families, and Communities

Recent years have seen an escalating expansion in home involvement in schooling and school-community linkages. Much of the impetus for change stems from educational reforms and initiatives for restructuring community health and social service agencies. The hope is to better meet the needs of children, families, and society by improving the effectiveness of schools and service agencies and hopefully strengthening neighborhoods. A key strategy is to establish collaborations. Properly done, enhanced connections among schools, families, and communities should lead to a marked reduction in young people's problems. Poorly done, these connections can end up as another effort that promised much but delivered little and even did some harm. Our goal here is to provide a perspective on efforts to enhance connections among schools, homes, and communities and suggest some major implications for the changing role of school counselors. Collaboration for What? Schools are located in communities, but often are islands with no bridges to the mainland. Families live in neighborhoods, often with little connection to each other or to the schools their youngsters attend. Nevertheless, all the entities affect each other, for good or bad. Because of this and because they share goals related to education and socialization of the young, schools, homes, and communities must collaborate with each other if they are to minimize problems and maximize results. Dealing with multiple and interrelated factors such as those arising from poverty, violence, developmental anomalies, crime, inadequate housing, and unemployment requires multiple and interrelated solutions (Shorr,1997). Interrelated solutions require collaboration. Why Should Schools Be Interested in Working with Others? Schools can better address barriers to learning and teaching and promote positive development when they are an integral and positive part of the community. Reciprocally, families and other community entities can better address barriers to development, learning, and parenting, and strengthen the fabric of family and community life by working in partnership with schools. Safety provides a major example of why schools need to collaborate. Concern about violence at schools provides opportunities for further isolation from the surrounding community or for enhancing connections with families and other neighborhood resources. In many cases, those responsible for school safety act as if violence on the campus had little to do with violence in the home and community. Youngsters generally do not experience such a separation. For them violence is a fact of life. And, it is not just about guns and killing. As Curcio and First (1993) noted: Violence in schools is a complex issue. Students assault teachers, strangers harm children, students hurt each other, and any one of the parties may come to school already damaged and violated [e.g., physically, sexually, emotionally, or negligently at home or on their way to or from school]. The kind of violence an individual encounters varies also, ranging from mere bullying to rape or murder (p. 4). Clearly, the problem goes well beyond the widely reported incidents that capture media attention. There isn't good data on how many youngsters are affected by all the forms of violence or how many are debilitated by such experiences. But of persons who have good reason to know, few would deny that the numbers are large. Far too many youngsters are caught up in cycles where they are the recipient or perpetrator (and sometimes both) of physical and sexual harassment ranging from excessive teasing and bullying to mayhem and major criminal acts. Given the scope of the problem-and its linkage with other problems that are significant barriers to development, learning, parenting, and teaching-- simplistic and single factor solutions cannot work. The need is for a full continuum of interventions, ranging from primary prevention through early-after-onset interventions to treatment of individuals with severe, pervasive, and chronic problems. …