STRATEGY IV Building Community Collaboration: Partnerships for Improvement “The major problems that schools grapple with—child abuse and neglect, poverty, violence, and substance abuse—originate in the culture outside the schoolhouse. School, business, and political leaders are recognizing that deep-seated societal ills injure children before they enter school. Even 12 years of school remediation efforts often fail.” Alton Crews      To be successful, schools must address the human service needs that prevent students from succeeding. Schools alone can't solve these problems, but they can lead the effort to coordinate the work of public and private agencies in their communities that deliver services to children, with an emphasis on early intervention. The Leadership Academy offers a specific training module on how to build these collaboratives.      “Bringing together human service agencies within a community and sitting around a table and talking is just the beginning point,” Crews says. “You have to identify children who come into this world in such deprived circumstances that if they don’t get help early when they get to the first grade, it’s too late; you can’t remediate them in 12 years. A community collaborative has to identify a specific child and a specific setting in which that child lives and develop an individualized support system for that child—and then stay with that child until he enters school and beyond.”      With the Institute of Educational Leadership in Washington, DC, the SREB Leadership Academy developed its module on building human services collaboratives. During this training session, participants begin by reviewing the national “Kids Count” data, which provide social and demographic statistics for each county in every state. The module outlines two types of collaborations. One is advisory. The other is an active, hands-on cooperative that provides direct services. It includes the work of all agencies that are required to provide services to children and families.       “Forming a collaborative is tough for schools to do because they are not sure what their role is,” Crews says. “The schools are reluctant to extend their services from age five down to age one. They don’t want to take on that role, but the school has to be the catalyst in bringing these other agencies together.”      This module is based on the philosophy that in the first two years of a child’s life, the focus should be on ensuring that the child is nurtured physically and emotionally. The next three years should focus on building the support system that will bring a child to the schoolhouse steps with a reasonable chance for success.      “Because the schools are the focus of the community they can help their communities see that when separate agencies, such as family and children’s services, public health, housing, law enforcement, and juvenile courts work separately, they are not effectively or appropriately serving families,” Crews says. “Each agency does its own thing. It has its own budget. It has its own mission. It has its own board. And their efforts are often futile and fragmented,” he says.      Bringing these organizations together requires collaborative skills on the part of school leaders. Teams study ways to develop these community-based human service collaboratives and can include a human service provider on the team to help them begin a collaborative in their districts.      For one school district, participation in the Leadership Academy was the beginning of a significant community project. The Glynn County, Georgia district had set as one of its goals having all children ready for school. “We believe if we are going to make a difference, we can’t rely on remediation,” says Marijo Pitts-Sheffield. “We need to look at early intervention, the earlier the better. Our philosophy is pay now or pay later. We saw [the Leadership Academy] as an opportunity to go for that goal.”      When the district began its participation in the Leadership Academy, it had no pre-kindergarten program. It now has 15 classes and serves nearly a third of the eligible population. “The Leadership Academy provided direction and focus and the self-confidence we needed. We focused on our specific goal and channeled our training to meeting that goal. The leadership training, the risk-taking and the module on collaboration were directly applied to this goal. The Leadership Academy empowered us.”      Pitts-Sheffield says her team was involved with the Leadership Academy at about the time that Georgia began providing funds for a pre-kindergarten program. “Since the Leadership Academy module on collaboration requires that you look at how you work with your agencies, we were able to use data from our SREB participation to [apply for pre -kindergarten funding]. We were one of the first 20 sites that received funding. SREB provided the groundwork that we needed to meet the mandates of these new programs that require collaboration. [That Academy seminar] marked the first time I ever thought about collaboration.”      Pitts-Sheffield says her district is still heavily involved in collaboration with human service agencies and has recently begun sharing funds among agencies. She adds that the collaboration project has experienced its share of “growing pains” regarding turf issues, but it has not derailed. Cooperation continues, she says.      “It helps when you can pick up a phone and be supportive of a family by just saying I’m sending so-and-so down [to another agency], and you have that trust between people. Before, [the other agencies] would have said Marijo who? What in the world does she want?”      In Winston-Salem/Forsyth County, North Carolina, an effort to establish cooperation among agencies is in the early stages. “One of the things we’re trying to accomplish in our school system—that came out of the Leadership Academy—is to establish an educational summit with all the players in the community,” Wilhelm says. “We duplicate a lot of services. We have our own nurses and social workers. Sometimes five different individuals are dealing with the same family and kids. We’re trying to bring all the players—Head Start, human services, social services and juvenile justice—together and say ‘Let’s see if there’s some way we can work as a team’ to streamline services to families and kids.”      The second type of collaboration included in the module is a community advisory or coordinating council that involves the business community, city councils or county commissions, civic groups and other active organizations within the community in school improvement programs. To help districts build this advisory council, teams participating in the Academy include a representative of the business community to serve as a technical adviser.       “You’ve got to have business organizations represented and government organizations represented,” Crews says. The advisory or coordinating council is a partnership that guides the process of change and allows school leaders to share and build support for their ideas. This council can begin the process of building the hands-on human services collaborative.      “The community advisory input serves as an early warning [communications] line if there is a problem [in the community] that could abort a program before it gets off the ground,” Crews says. “So many school systems run aground because they don’t have any contacts out there to help them avoid problems.”      In Columbia County, Florida, the business community is highly supportive of the district’s participation in the Leadership Academy and is closely involved with many programs in the schools, Superintendent Lane says. A representative from the county’s Chamber of Commerce is a member of the district’s Leadership Academy team.      “Involving the business community in buying into the goals has been a very, very positive part of the experience,” she says. “Not only have we had our Chamber of Commerce director as part of our Leadership Academy team, but we have kept our chamber education committee apprised of the goals. It has become the most active chamber committee that we have in our community, and its interest is directly related to our participation in the Academy. They’ve been partners in several ways in doing things that are going to have long-term positive results for our kids.”      Several Columbia County businesses have set up executive internships for college-bound students and apprentice programs for technical career students, Lane says. “It has made wonderful connections for the students too. Some of those businesses have given students jobs during Christmas and in the summer.”       The local NationsBank has also supported the district’s involvement in the Leadership Academy. NationsBank annually hosts a luncheon that offers the district an opportunity to provide a “state of the schools” report to the community. About 200 businesses attend each year, Lane says. NationsBank and the chamber education committee also have developed an “A-plus Awards for Excellence” program for businesses that are active in the schools. “All of this is directly related to the involvement of NationsBank and the Chamber and their commitment to what we’re doing,” Lane says. Journals—A Key to Insight Profiles Next—Advancing School Leadership with a Comprehensive Approach