Meeting the needs of the whole child is the goal of
community schools, which partner with other agencies to offer a range of services and opportunities.
R 28 Leadership
ecess ends and second-grader Ivana returns to her classroom, out of breath and a little more winded than usual. She and her
29 classmates head back into the room to start a math lesson and before long, Ivana is heavily wheezing. Not sure of what might be wrong, the teacher sends Ivana to the office, where the secretary thinks the child might be having an asthma attack. After calming the child down, the secretary calls 911 and an ambulance and fire truck are dispatched while Ivana’s parents leave work to meet her at the emergency room. Now imagine this same scenario if Ivana
was educated at a full-service school, one with linked “community” services. She would have headed to the health center, where a medical staffer would have worked through the attack using Ivana’s inhaler and perhaps a nebulizer treatment. Thirty min- utes later, Ivana would have been back in class learning, the city’s fire and ambulance
staff would have been freed up for more pressing emergencies, and Ivana’s parents would have remained at work, pulling in the income to feed their struggling family of six. This is just one example of how schools
with linked services, otherwise known as community schools, are able to provide for the needs of students, minimizing the im- pact on instructional time.
What are community schools? A community school is not a program.
It’s a way of doing business – a collabora- tive approach to supporting student suc- cess by offering a range of services and op- portunities such as physical and mental health services, after-school and summer programming, and family engagement and
By David Gomez, Lisa Gonzales, Deanna Niebuhr and Lisa Villarreal
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