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Recommendations | |
Community engagement is part of every School Improvement Plan.As such, it is evaluated each year -- specifically, base rate data are gathered, reasonable goals are established, appropriate specific actions are identified to accomplish them and evaluation of progress being made is conducted periodically both by community members and school personnel. Currently, every school is required to submit an annual School Improvement Plan. Site Councils oversee the creation and evaluation of School Improvement Plans. There are now two areas on which the plans focus: student achievement and school climate. Our task group believes that adding a third focus to the School Improvement Plan would be the best way to make school staff people accountable for making continuous efforts to improve community engagement practices. In the same ways that 4J and community people recognize that their work is never done in the areas of student achievement and school climate, the task group believes that they need to think similarly about their work in the area of community engagement. Many task group members believe that too often 4J staff members see community engagement as an incident-driven or time-limited process. Instead, all of the members believe that community engagement is a never-ending process -- there may be a beginning point, there may be benchmarks of progress being made, but there ought never be an end to it. All School Improvement Plans currently involve a systematic study of whether or not there have been changes in either student achievement or school climate as a result of some specific interventions identified by both school and community people. Base rate data are gathered, desired outcomes are described, and a number of interventions designed to achieve the outcomes over the course of an academic year are identified. Systematic, periodic evaluation of progress being made toward the goals is an integral part of School Improvement Plans. For improvements to be made in the ways 4J staff members engage the community, task group members believe that a similar rigor needs to be applied. It makes sense, therefore, to include community engagement as a third area of focus for all School Improvement Plans. School staff and other 4J employees regularly solicit opinions, ideas, needs and preferences from community members and then continue to engage them to create change and develop relationships.4J staff members have for a long time routinely solicited input from community members before making major changes. From the perspectives of many task group members, 4J almost always invites "public input" and then dismisses the public. 4J staff members are then perceived to use whatever information was gathered to factor in to any decisions that they then make; community people have ceased being part of the process. Task group members believe that community engagement requires relationships developed over time. Such relationships may have a clear beginning. They afford opportunities over time to take readings on effectiveness. They may evolve over time, but they do not end. Without enduring, evolving relationships, significant community engagement cannot occur. This "surveying" and communicating will ideally occur at the school level. Schools will reach out to their neighborhoods, contacting parents, residents and businesses in their area, and begin a dialogue. Phone calls, fliers, letters, door-to-door visits, coffee or lunch meetings, and open houses are all methods to communicate. Part of the surveying should be to find out how people best like to receive information or to exchange ideas. Ideally, schools would then tailor their efforts to people's preferences. Not everyone will care about the information or want the interaction, but they will at least know that an attempt is being made. In this way, schools can share activities, offer assistance or services to the neighborhood and provide information, and banish the notion that "we only hear from schools when they want money." Of course, each school's parent community should also be surveyed. This is especially important to assess the success or relevance of school governance for parents. It is critical for schools to develop and strengthen relationships with their neighborhoods. Schools can then be the vessels through which people can receive "district" information; because a relationship exists with the school, that information will be better received than from "the district," which can seem like a separate and unfamiliar entity. 4J Education Center administration can carry out similar efforts with major businesses, social services, and government agencies in the area and region, using the same principles. 4J should also carry out regular, valid "benchmark" surveys of the whole community to establish a baseline of community understanding and preferences. Information related to community engagement efforts throughout 4J is shared within both 4J and the Eugene community.While everyone can list negative experiences or talk about how things can be better, we agree that many schools are doing good things in community engagement. Individually, task group members were able to identify a number of ways individual people and whole school staffs were already working successfully with community members to benefit both students and adult members of the community. Most often, however, the successful community engagement efforts being made were not widely known either throughout 4J or within the community. For a number of reasons, task group members believe that it is very important to communicate clearly every success experienced in community engagement both within 4J and the community at large. Sharing "good news" and "success stories" builds positive energy within any community. Such sharing allows others within the community to see ways that they, too, might engage their communities -- after all, a particular strategy or activity worked in one place; perhaps with a little customization to another situation, it might work equally well for someone else. Networking opportunities are created by sharing "good news" and "success stories." People -- both school personnel and community people -- hearing or reading of someone else’s success can learn to whom they might turn to collaborate on related ventures in the future. Over time, by widely sharing "good news" and "success stories," a cache of "best practices" can be developed which will offer a resource for people wanting to increase the range and quality of the ways they engage their communities. Not only will the ideas for engagement be in the cache, but the names of contact people somehow connected to those ideas will also be available. Such networking has the potential for strengthening our whole community and keeping us all focused on a central part of 4J’s mission -- i.e., "do what is best for students, continue to learn and grow and respect and care about each other." With the implementation of a community engagement "point person" (see recommendation 6 below), this sharing could be very simple through regular meetings or e-mails. The "point persons" could also share successes with other groups in the area and further develop best practices. 4J tracks and promotes many and varied opportunities for community members and groups to become involved with schools and 4J programs.Our task group believes that many community members would be willing and eager to engage with 4J staff members around a variety of education-related matters. However, the ways for community people currently to become involved seem limited and those possibilities that exist do not seem to be well promoted. A volunteer coordinator in an individual school maintains an extensive, ever-changing list of ways for volunteers to become involved by donating time in that school. 4J staff members ought to consider the merits of gathering together in one easily accessible central resource the opportunities for community members to engage at individual school sites and/or at the Education Center. For example, some schools may have so many volunteers that to take on more is a burden rather than help, while other schools desperately need more assistance. Yet even 4J's volunteer coordinator doesn't know what buildings could match up with what volunteers or services. A variety of ways to promote community involvement opportunities ought to be considered. People from different communities in Eugene attend to different media and get their information in different ways. Relying on one or two promotional vehicles to communicate opportunities for community involvement with 4J will likely reach only limited parts of our larger community. As a result, some segments of our larger community may receive and integrate the information while others may not. Community people understand and can access school-related public information in a number of "user-friendly" ways.Much information that 4J and individual school sites maintain is public: upon request, any person in our community may have access to it. Members of the task group believe that there are not shared understandings among 4J staff members regarding what information can be shared with the public and what needs to be withheld. They also believe that many members of the community do not understand what information they have the right to request and review either from individual school sites or from the 4J Education Center. Information can be active (that which is transmitted to people) or passive (that which exists, waiting for people to find it). For active information, 4J should do its best to make sure that information reaches its target and is then received effectively. That may mean evaluating each different audience for the best way to get information to them (face-to-face at a meeting, door-to-door, over the phone, by mail, by e-mail, etc.). For passive information, 4J should work to establish well-known and easy-to-access locations for information that seems to be important or in high demand. That importance and demand can be evaluated in many ways, but in part at least should be determined by communicating with different audiences. For either type, "user-friendly" includes making accommodations for different languages, or for physical impairments. Ideas to address this include:
A goal would be to send parents and community members to as few places as possible to get information. For example, if a key contact at each school is the school secretary, that person should be well-versed in what public information exists and how it is distributed. It is also important to note that publications that are for the public or those that are of likely public interest (such as school improvement plans) should be written and organized so members of the public can easily understand them. This area demands more research on effective practices, because of the high costs and mixed results of communication like mailing, printing, broadcasting, advertising, etc. Each school and 4J as a whole has a highly skilled individual who acts as a "point person" regarding community engagement.As the report states earlier, community engagement is an on-going process that is based on developing and nurturing evolving relationships. As such, community engagement is time-demanding and energy draining. It ought not to ever be "put on the back burner" as other demands require an employee's extended attention. Although the task group believes that everyone associated with 4J has a role to play in community engagement, someone at the Education Center and in each building needs to "own" community engagement as her/his work. Community engagement is her/his assignment, not an "over and above" the work that s/he is expected to do. It should be made clear that this person's presence would not relieve other 4J staff members of the need to practice community engagement. This person would coordinate, inspire or even monitor community engagement efforts in the school, but would not be the only practitioner. Also, to be effective, this person must have the appropriate respect and "weight" or "clout" as a staff member to be able to be taken seriously and to interact collaboratively with the principal. The principal, of course, would continue to be the person ultimately responsible for community engagement progress (as he or she is in other school improvement goals). This sort of engagement goes beyond the day-to-day efforts that all employees should make: being friendly, helpful, courteous, respectful and mindful of others, etc. This sort of engagement includes recruiting, training or managing volunteers, organizing events, facilitating use of the building, establishing partnerships in the community, and more. Obviously, those activities require time, energy and skills. Community engagement activities require a person who has high energy and finely honed skills. S/he must be organized, focused, able to keep track of "the big picture" and the minutiae that it takes to bring it to fruition. S/he must be able to relate with a wide variety of people in a number of different settings. S/he must also be able to lead a team of people, collaborate with them and delegate work to be completed. Through the presence and efforts of point persons, 4J could better move toward the "schools as hubs" vision. The point person in each school would be able to establish and nurture relationships with agencies, groups and individuals. The person would also be able to take responsibility for building use by outside groups. Besides allowing many types of community engagement to happen, the presence of this position would send a message to community members that 4J is dedicated to meeting their needs. 4J staff members embrace the goals of community engagement, and practice it daily.This implies the "buy-in" that is so crucial to the success of any system-wide process. Employees in every area must understand the need to engage the community. They must see the short- and long-term benefits for themselves in order to put their heart into their efforts, and to avoid feeling as though community engagement is another "hoop to jump through." As we've said, community engagement is not something to check off from a "to-do" list. It is ongoing. In some cases, this means thinking differently. Even though we have recommended a person at each building who takes the lead in organizing activities and who facilitates community involvement, community engagement does not stop with that person. It means being friendly and helpful to people who come in the building, not assuming "someone else" will deal with them. It means taking the extra time to be helpful, even if it is an inconvenience. It means learning the names of volunteers, saying hello and asking how they've been, and not acting like they're part of the wallpaper. In essence, it is a dedication to the importance of valuing each other as people. Task group members agreed that a by-product of adopting that attitude is that the building becomes a more joyful place to work and visit. The benefits aren't only to the parents or members of the public who receive that treatment. One method to reach this goal is to train all employees, especially administrators, in the importance of integrating community engagement into daily routine. The task group acknowledges that some employees may see community engagement activities as a burden on top of an already-full work pile. This may be even more true if employees sense that they are being forced to do things as part of a district-wide mandate. However, employees will be self-motivated (and more enthusiastic) if they can be shown how to weave community engagement into their regular duties. In this way, they can see it not only as an expected and evaluated part of their job, but as a path to personal success and fulfillment. Other important training opportunities would be to work with teachers on relating effectively to parents, and to work with school secretaries on balancing their extreme workload with the need for schools to have an engaging and helpful emissary. Sometimes, the public encounters a "proprietary" attitude in schools, especially in regard to information or use of the building. While this protective stance is understandable, it can appear very defeating to the public. It is important for all employees to approach interactions with the public positively, focusing on possibilities, rather than negatively. Overall, all employees need to see how they can think broadly about engagement. | |
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Eugene School District 4J