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Community Learning Centers:

Keystones for Building Viable Educational Systems

by Dee Dickinson

 

"We must be able not only to transform our institutions in response to changing situations and requirements; we must invent and develop institutions that are "learning systems," that is to say, systems capable of bringing about their own continuing transformation.

    Malcolm Knowles Partnering School and Community

     

A Different Place to Learn

"Welcome to Silver Ridge. I'll be your guide, and the first thing I want you to know is that every student in this school is special. If everybody didn't help out and work together we wouldn't have the great school we have." This was our greeting by a bright-eyed, red-haired nine-year old girl, whose special task that day was to be a visitors' guide. She explained that every student is assigned "meaningful work" that is essential to the operation of this successful elementary school. As she spoke, a youngster with cerebral palsy passed by in his wheel chair, delivering students' lunch tickets to each room.

The teachers and parents at Silver Ridge Elementary School in Silverdale, Washington spent two years of evenings and weekends planning both the program and facilities for their new school. The result is an innovative building that facilitates collaborative work and project-based learning. The plan called for the school to be open from 6 am to 6 pm, provide day-care for younger siblings and for teachers' children, and offer after-school enrichment activities for children whose parents could come for them after work. Children with special needs are included in both the preschool and regular school, allowing all the students opportunities to develop altruism, understanding, and compassion as they learn together. The plan also called for beginning school ten minutes early and closing ten minutes later four days a week, which met required teacher-pupil contact time and made it possible to end school at 1 p.m. one day a week. During that afternoon, the teachers participated in weekly staff development while the students were involved in enrichment and remedial activities planned and supervised by the parents.

Two years ago the afternoon program was terminated when funding was lost because of a defeated school levy. In addition, new personnel in central administration wanted all schools in the district to offer similar opportunities, but could not see how this could be accomplished. The Silver Ridge community has been planning creatively to find new ways of meeting the needs of students, parents, and teachers. Because the district has a long history of being involved in community education, school buildings are still open early for day care and in the evenings for recreational activities and adult education.

The foregoing story is an example of a school that reflects the needs of the community and functions with the community's help to offer the best possible education. Flexibility and adaptability are hallmarks of such programs. Following is some background of community education, examples of different kinds of learning communities both in existing and new kinds of facilities, some of the reasons community learning centers have not become a standard part of our educational systems, what it takes to make them successful, and why they now have a crucial role to play as educators seek ways to meet the escalating challenges in today's schools and communities. Background

Background

The concept of community education is not new. The ancient Greeks called it "paideia," a community in which everyone was involved in education as both learner and teacher throughout life. Socrates and Plato, who both created learning communities, recognized that learning is essentially a social process. In fact, in every age learning communities have functioned in many different forms. In the United States in the late 1800's John Dewey, whose profound effect on educational planning and practice continues, believed that a community and its schools must collaborate to establish true learning. In Democracy and Education, he wrote, "The development within the young of the attitudes and dispositions necessary to the continuous and progressive life of a society cannot take place by direct conveyance of beliefs, emotions, and knowledge. It takes place through the intermediary of the environment. The environment consists of the sum total of conditions which are concerned in the execution of the activity characteristic of a living being." Considering that today most students spend only about 11% of their time in school, we have no choice but to be concerned about the role of the community in education.

In the 1930's in Flint, Michigan, a city recreation leader, Frank J. Manley, and a wealthy industrialist, Charles Stewart Mott, began a partnership that lay the foundations for the community education movement. They were concerned about preventing juvenile delinquency, fostering healthy human development, and creating a better world. They believed that when we "give kids something to do, they won't get into trouble." The early programs focused on recreational activities for students, but soon grew into programs that provided supplementary education and attempted to meet the needs of the entire community. Four basic principles became the foundation of today's community education concept:

  • The school serves all of the community, not just its youth. As the educational center of the community rather than the educational center for the youth of the community, the school should provide all people extended learning opportunities.

  • The school facilities in a community are a major resource of that community, and maximum use should be made of that resource. Schools should not be limited to an 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. day, but should be available in the evening and on weekends for a variety of community activities.

  • Educational opportunities made available to the community should reflect citizens' interests and needs, as well as the curriculum established by the professional educators of the community.

  • The quality of education provided children is enhanced when a close relationship between school and community is established. Providing educational opportunities to the entire community is one of the best ways of assuring this close interrelationship.

These principles guided the "lighted schoolhouses" that were open nearly around the clock and that spread across the nation in the 1950's and 1960's. Many of these projects were supported through funding by the Mott Foundation. In the early sixties, the Foundation established a program to train leaders in community education, and in 1966, the National Community School Education Association was established. Both the Foundation and the NCSE are still actively involved in implementing community learning programs that are growing in new ways today.

Need has never been greater for programs that can deal with the increasing problems of juvenile drug and alcohol abuse, violence, crime, delinquency, children having children, and the challenges that many parents face in raising their children alone. Young people cannot learn when they come to school hungry, homeless, abused, and frightened. Schools alone cannot solve these problems, and they must be attended to if our world is to survive. It seems obvious that community learning centers, often open around the clock, offering not only education but integrated health, social service, and recreational programs may provide answers to today's challenges. They also help to bring communities together. With such a long history of possibilities, why are so many schools still struggling alone? Why do community learning centers not exist everywhere?

There are many answers to those questions. One is that their development takes strong, visionary leaders, efficient staff and reliable volunteers, a lot of hard work, careful planning, the ability to collaborate and rise above protecting turf, and they take money. Many successful programs have been closed or cut back, as in the example of Silver Ridge, when funding was lost and central leadership changed. Continuity can also be affected when population increases or decreases, or when unexpected needs arise. Meeting these challenges takes "thinking outside the dots," and sometimes crises turn into opportunities that rally the efforts of entire communities.

The story of Poland (Ohio) Union Elementary School is one example. In 1985, the 106 year-old building was no longer needed because of declining enrollments. The Poland Board of Education was offered $200,000 for the building; however, under the leadership of their superintendent, they took a long look into the future and determined that if enrollment should increase again, they would need this building and it would be very costly to build a new one. They decided to remodel the building and turn it into a Continuing Education Center with lifelong learning opportunities for everyone in the community. Soon the 22 rooms were filled with permanent rentals to various organizations.

The facility came to life with dance, art, physical fitness programs, a copy center which provided services to other schools in Poland, and preschool and child care programs. The gymnasium and cafeteria were rented to groups for athletic programs, adult education, after school enrichment courses, youth groups, summer schools, free tax counseling for Seniors, and Board of Education meetings. An after school latchkey program served children throughout the district, and saved $8000 in transportation costs as parents could take their children home after work. Open from early morning until late evening, the center was not only financially self-sustaining but brought in a profit.

Two years ago, with the population back up, the Center program was terminated, the elementary school reopened, and the programs were disseminated throughout the community, where many of the schools continue to offer before and after-school use of the facilities. Close collaboration, anticipation of future changes, and responsiveness to those changes when they came resulted in enormous savings and a well-served community.

Legislation has been created both federally and locally to support programs such as these, but there is no guarantee that such funding will continue. In 1994, federal legislation was passed by the U.S. Congress to help fund community schools. The Community School Program cosponsored by Senators Bill Bradley (D. New Jersey) and John Danforth (R. Missouri) was attached to the 1994 crime bill as a prevention strategy; however, the Bill was repealed by the "Contract With America," and the money saved was allocated to construct more prisons. It behooves all of us who believe in the critical importance of education to keep track of such legislation and to respond loudly and clearly to legislators.

In addition to broad educational value, the community education concept and the schools that are built around it offer preventive rather than punitive, after-the-fact solutions to our growing social problems. Community learning centers bring together entire communities to plan and learn together. They also are manifest examples of distributed cognition, i.e. that intelligence is not just in our heads, but in the resources of the environment, in the tools we use, and in our interaction with other people. And that means all the people in the educational community.

New Models

Too often students are left out of the planning process. In 1990, with the able assistance of architects Steven Bingler and Anne Taylor, the Lincoln Unified School District in Stockton, California embarked on an ambitious process involving 300 students, parents, education professionals, and community representatives in redesigning the district's thirteen sites, including a new 40-acre learning site, now under construction. The primary focus of the Lincoln Plan is on the students, and each site will be connected to a network of resources in the community. The learning process will take advantage of these resources in making learning real and relevant to students' interests.

Students at the Lincoln High West Campus explored their community to find out what they could learn that would contribute to their planning. They discovered a fitness center that included education about nutrition, cardiovascular activity, and different forms of exercise. Recognizing its relevance to their needs, the students invited the fitness operator to a planning meeting, the outcome of which was the incorporation of a fitness facility in the new high school at no cost to taxpayers. The facility will operate before school and evenings for the community, and will be used during the school day by the students.

It was also the students' input that led to other possibilities for school/community collaboration. They imagined that a farm would be an inspiring learning environment, and that this peaceful setting might also be used for business retreats and meeting facilities, which would make further use of the technology center, meeting rooms, and auditorium already incorporated into the plans. A marketing consultant, who was retained to advise on the feasibility of this plan, confirmed that such a joint use facility could realize a net savings of over four million dollars to taxpayers.

Another school district just north of Stockton heard of the planning project and decided to use the same participatory design model to create their master plan. As the community became involved in the planning, a real estate developer became interested enough to donate 300 acres of prime real estate plus two thousand mandarin orange trees to plant on the site. The projected revenue will be over $400,000 a year to the district, and the students will receive academic and ecological training in the process--learning by doing!

Bingler notes that, "There are other imperatives for exploring the development of more expansive environments for learning. One of the most compelling is that we can no longer afford to build and maintain the stand alone physical infrastructure that has characterized factory model schools of the twentieth century. . . Most of these stand alone schools were built to last for an average of forty years. Over the past hundred years, we have built and rebuilt them two and a half times, or at least everyone thought we had. In 1996, the U.W. General Accounting Office declared that we were $112 billion behind in deferred maintenance." Here again is a call for "thinking outside the dots."

In a recent article, Less is More-- Learning Environments for the Next Century, Bingler describes schools located in a museum (The Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan), a zoo (outside of Minneapolis), and one being planned in a retirement community (in Phoenix, Arizona). It is easy to imagine the rich resources for learning that these environments and their personnel will provide, as well as enormous savings in construction and maintenance.

Big City Challenges

Large cities often offer major challenges to educators, with their multicultural, sometimes non-English speaking populations and larger proportions of disabled, disenfranchised, and poverty-stricken students. These challenges call for innovative solutions often using existing facilities, but with the whole educational community involved. Seven years ago in Seattle, the Powerful Schools project was born. It is a coalition of four inner city elementary schools and two community organizations focused on improving student learning, strengthening the community, and creating a successful and cost-effective model for school reform.

Students' academic performance, evaluated by the Washington Research Institute, has been steadily improving, as a result of the Reading Club program, Powerful Buddies volunteer mentoring program, and Powerful Writers program, an innovative strategy for teacher development which involves extended residencies of writers with culturally diverse backgrounds. The Powerful Arts Coalition is a partnership between the schools and leading arts organizations including the Seattle Children's Theatre, Symphony, and Art Museum. A partnership with University Preparatory Academy, an independent middle school/high school, offers a summer enrichment program with focus on the basic skills.

Powerful Schools encourages community involvement through evening classes and recreation programs, including the Health and Nutrition Education Project which has served over 2100 individuals attending Family Fun nights. Last year, Powerful Schools offered over 100 after school and evening classes serving over 650 children and adults. This project is not only succeeding in creating successful community learning centers, but is creating a model that can be replicated. Members of the staff are now consultants to four other coalitions of schools in the Seattle area. The Powerful Schools Handbook: Starting and Running a Collaborative Schools Improvement Program, is available from the project based at the address listed below.

On an even larger scale, the Seattle Public Schools are benefiting from their partnership with the Alliance for Education. Developed in 1995, the Alliance serves as a convener of corporate and community support around initiatives that increase academic achievement, a catalyst to shape and focus partnerships with education, and a conduit for resources from the community to schools. Directed by a Board of more than fifty of Seattle's top executives, this organization makes it possible to integrate investments of volunteer time and financial resources of large numbers of business, nonprofit, and governmental organizations. The work of the Alliance is guided by three strategic goals: Academic Achievement, Educational Leadership, and coordinated Public and Private resources.

Since its establishment, the Alliance has launched a citywide Reading Campaign, established a Principals' Leadership Institute, enhanced the adopt-a-school Partners in Public Education program, and has raised over $8 million in private resources corporations and foundations and over 8,400 individuals. One of the most important collaborative activities has been the formation of "compacts," which include Reading and Literacy (involving more than 50 businesses and community organizations), Instructional Technology (involving over 40 organizations), Visual and Performing Arts (including over 100 affiliate arts organizations), Environmental Education (involving students in 31 schools, teacher workshops, and an Environmental Web site), School to Work (which involves recruiting classroom speakers, planning field trips, arranging job shadowing, and providing internships), and International Languages and Culture (with over 30 organizations, and an international school in the planning,). The Alliance acts as a fiscal agent for the Seattle Athletics and Facilities Education Board, dedicated to rebuilding an outstanding physical education and athletics program for Seattle Schools. The Alliance is also helping to foster the ideals of citizenship and community service by providing 10 full time service learning coordinators from VISTA through the Corporation for National Service.

Simultaneously with the formation of the Alliance, Seattle was privileged to welcome a new Superintendent, John Stanford, who is a visionary educational leader, dedicated to developing world class schools. Under his leadership, academic achievement is improving, dropout rates and violence are declining, busing has been eliminated in favor of neighborhood schools, and a landmark new contract with the teachers union will make Seattle the first school district nationally to hold teachers accountable for student achievement. Seniority has been eliminated in favor of successful teaching.

What it Takes to Succeed

All of the above examples illustrate the importance of visionary leaders who know how to create open systems, within which they are able to empower others, delegate, facilitate, and collaborate. It is also critical to have experienced, efficient staff; teachers who know and can apply effective instructional strategies for diverse populations of students; and consistent, reliable volunteers from the community. The importance of allocating time and funding for training and staff development cannot be underestimated. At one time it would have been an enormous task to coordinate such efforts, identify changing community needs, catalog changing resources, and keep track of results. It is essential to know what is working and what is not, and to create a strong Research and Development system to feed that information back into the process. With computers and databases, the task becomes more manageable.

We are now at a time in the history of our country, and indeed the world, when we must marshal our most valuable resources to revitalize our communities and make learning available to all. Schools and communities working together can help people of all ages and ability levels to discover their strengths and develop their capacities as fully as possible. Successful learners are our future, and they will create the future of humanity.

Resources

Organizations
(Publications are available from the following):

    Designs for Learning/Community Learning Centers
    (Developed by New American Schools)
    1355 Pierce Butler Rte.
    St. Paul, MN 555104-1359
    Phone: 612-645-0200

    International Community Education Association
    Lying Hall, Blackberry Lane
    Coventry, CV2 3JS
    England
    Phone: 011-44-0203-638-670

    Mid-Atlantic Center for Community Education
    University of Virginia
    405- Emmet St., Ruffner Hall
    Charlottesville, VA 22903
    Phone: 804-924-0866

    The Mott Foundation
    1200 Mott Foundation Bldg.
    Flint, MI 48502
    Phone: 810-238-5651

    National Center for Community Education
    1017 Avon Street
    Flint, MI 48503
    Phone: 8100-238-0463

    National Community Education Association
    3929 Old Lee Highway, Suite 91A
    Fairfax, VA 22020-2401
    Phone: 703-359-8973

    Powerful Schools
     3301 South Horton
    Seattle, WA 98144
    Phone: 206-722-5543

Websites:
(Electronic Learning Communities and Resources):

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