HGSE News: Knitting Together Fragmented Services/Full Service and Community Schools

Imagine a child—call her Madeleine—who is working with a specialist for her reading disability and who participates in a weekly group for anger management. Imagine, too, that Madeleine's mother is working with a state social worker about custody issues and is a member of a group for victims of domestic violence. Too often, in the countless cases like this, the professionals helping this family don't talk to one another; no one really knows Madeleine's complete story.

Margot Welch, Collaborative for Integrated School Services director (Mary Lee/ Harvard News Office photo)

According to Margot Welch, founding director of the Collaborative for Integrated School Services, this is an alarmingly common scenario. "An HGSE student volunteer for the Massachusetts Department of Social Services recently attended a meeting of one family's 12 service providers, and none of them new each other," she says. "I attended the same kinds of meetings twenty-five years ago. Very little has changed."

A New School Model
Welch says that a new school model addresses the problems of fragmented child services, while helping all children succeed in school. Full service and community schools combine a range of educational, health, and social services to meet the specific needs of communities and their children. "There is no single design for these schools; each and every one is different," she says. For example, a community may want to offer English as a Second Language classes for families; that community could work with its local school to create an evening instruction program and also a child care center so parents can participate.

In a community where many parents work long hours, full service and community school programs may serve hot breakfasts and provide afterschool activities and tutoring to children. Welch explains that the goal of community schools is to ensure that children are ready and able—socially, physically, and emotionally—to learn. There are some programs that run 7 days a week, 12 months of the year to meet their community's needs.

Responding to the Statistics
More than ever, the amount of time parents spend with their children is diminishing. The Bureau of Labor statistics recently found that maternal employment has almost doubled in the past quarter-century. By extending their work days, the average married couple in 1996 packed six more weeks of work into the year than they did in 1989. This can leave children without a safe, supportive place to be before and after school. Recent studies have found that the juvenile crime rates quadruple between 2:00 and 6:00 PM.

When parents invest in their children's learning through a community school, the whole family benefits. One of Welch's students, an intern at an evolving full service school, recently asked parents what it meant to them to be involved with their children's school. "She expected them to say something rather general—for example, that they learned how to show their children the value of education," says Welch.

Instead, parents talked about how they saw their own advancement through community school programs as the best way to help their children. One parent said, "I'm learning English. Soon I can ask for a raise. Then I can work two jobs instead of three and spend more time at home." Another said, "I'm learning how to use the computer. And now I can start to understand what my child is doing, and I can begin to help him."

According to a report issued by the Coalition for Community Schools, a non-profit, non-partisan partnership based at the institute for educational leadership in Washington D.C., full service schools improve literacy skills for the children and parents, decrease suspensions and discipline problems, increase attendance, and cut down on teacher absenteeism. The Children's Aid Society set up a full service community school in Washington Heights, an immigrant community with the highest crime rate in Manhattan. "The school may be helping to stabilize the community," says Welch. "As parents discover have a place in the school, they don't want to move out of the area so quickly."

A Proactive Response to a New Understanding
Like child care and afterschool programs, thriving full-service and community school programs need strong infrastructures to guide their governance, financing, and training components. But these new school models, which are often complex and assume real community investment, don't come with road maps. "In order to make these innovative solutions successful, we still need more financial investment, more research, and more public understanding and support," says Welch.

The differences between models—which can be state- or county-wide, building-, district-, or foundation-based—make it difficult to report the precise growth of these programs. But more and more communities are seeing their value. "Their rising popularity is not just a response to another crisis," says Welch. "It's a proactive response to our new understanding about what all children need. "We can no longer separate the child at school from the child afterschool and from the child at home. The wellbeing of the whole child is tied to the wellbeing of the whole community."

For More Information
Read more about Margot Welch in the Faculty Profiles. More information about the Collaborative for Integrated School Services is available at the CISS Web site.

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