Lake County Healthy Start started at
one elementary school, established with the support of a Healthy Start grant in 1991. It now serves 20 schools in all seven of the county’s school districts. “In the past school year, Healthy Start served over 2,500 stu- dents and their families, providing support, encouragement and practical assistance to help ensure the students of Lake County have what they need to succeed in school,” reports Wally Holbrook, superintendent, Lake County Office of Education. Indeed, many efforts launched with
Healthy Start grants are alive and well today – efforts that were not only sustained but even expanded, in some cases district-wide.
Building a governance infrastructure The success of a community schools ef-
fort is directly correlated with the strength of the infrastructure supporting its part- nerships. Time and resources must be de- voted to establishing working relationships among partners and creating systems that allow partners to collaboratively assess needs, share resources and make decisions. While developing these relationships and systems is time-consuming and may not ad- dress immediate community needs, it is a critical initial step to develop a community school effort. Discussions about filling service gaps
and determining which services should be offered need to take place after each partner understands the purpose and role of the col- laboration. In other words, decisions about the “how to work together” are made before the decisions about “what to do.” The Redwood City School District op-
erates four community schools with onsite family resource centers and offers extended-
R
esearch confirms that students do worse in school if they are not
in class to learn (Attendance Works, 2011). n An analysis of chronically absent
kindergarten students revealed a lower subsequent academic performance in grade 1 than their peers, with reading scores for Latino children the most af- fected. n Among low-income children who
lack the resources to make up for time on task, chronic kindergarten absences translated into lower achievement in grade 5. n By grade 6, chronic absence
can be associated with dropping out of school. n By grade 9, missing 20 percent
of school can be a better predictor of dropout than grade 8 test scores.
day services at eight other sites. While the district is the lead agency, the community school effort is a joint initiative of Redwood City 2020 (RC2020) – a formal partnership established in 1999 between San Mateo County, the City of Redwood City, the Red- wood City School District, and the Sequoia Union High School District. RC2020 started as an “umbrella” to ad-
dress in a more coordinated way the mul- tiple issues facing students and families in Redwood City. Over time, other partners have joined, including the John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities (Stanford University) and foundations that serve the role of critical funding partners. RC2020’s structure follows a key best practice for governance. An infrastructure
for partnering is established at the leader- ship/policy, executive/management and site levels. At each level, partner agencies popu- late a partner team with a person(s) with the appropriate expertise and decision-making power. RC2020 has a coordinating council that sets the policy direction, an executive cabinet that makes management decisions, and two staff, including an executive direc- tor and administrative assistant. The executive director works with site
coordinators and community-based provid- ers to implement the initiative at the school sites. RC2020’s collaborative approach en- sures that all the partners stay committed to the vision and its implementation. “It is part of our culture and way of doing busi- ness that has outlasted changes in leader- ship at all levels,” said Shelly Masur, school board member in the Redwood City School District. In addition to providing funding for its
core initiatives, each of the RC2020 partners contribute $25,000 annually to convene RC2020 and pay for the two staff that man- age its initiatives. Having this infrastructure in place has allowed RC2020 to maintain and build on its community schools initia- tive even through agency leadership change and severe budget cuts. The Redwood City School District estimates that its return on investment for its $25,000 is approximately $2.5 million in services (Bookmyer & Nie- buhr, 2011).
Shared goals and priorities It is very common in the evolution of the
community school efforts that the collabo- ration starts by offering the services part- ners bring with them to the table. While of- fering services at or via a school can improve the accessibility of those services, it does not guarantee that these are the supports that families need or want most. Nor does it guarantee that even if they are the right services, families will access them. Crucial steps for building a community
school that is responsive to the community include assessment, planning, and family and community engagement in the planning process. To ensure that the engagement is authentic, investments in capacity-building Continued on page 37
30 Leadership
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