The School Is the Heart of the Community PDF

THE SCHOOL IS THE HEART OF THE COMMUNITY BUILDING COMMUNITY SCHOOLS ACROSS NEW YORK CITY Natasha Capers When my children were still in elementary school in New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg released his annual list of schools that were ‘low performing’ and slated for closure. My children’s s...

THE SCHOOL IS THE HEART OF THE COMMUNITY BUILDING COMMUNITY SCHOOLS ACROSS NEW YORK CITY Natasha Capers When my children were still in elementary school in New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg released his annual list of schools that were ‘low performing’ and slated for closure. My children’s school, PS 298 in Brownsville, Brooklyn, was on the list. PS 298 is my alma mater. I attended that school until sixth grade. It’s surrounded by New York City public housing, but it was always considered a jewel of Brownsville. It had great programming, with a glee club, athletics, and a newspaper. And this was just an elementary school. I was a ‘mathlete’ at the school. We had opportunities to get out of the building and do things and explore. But over the years, the school declined. When my children began attending, I could see that there had been disinvestment. At one point the school didn’t have a functioning library or a librarian. There wasn’t an up-to-date computer lab. Many of the after-school programs had been cut. And yet I loved and still love PS 298; I see the glory that is within the walls of my alma mater. I was the vice president of the parent association and chair of the school leadership team at the time the school was slated for closure in the fall of 2011. I received a call from Fiorella Guevara from the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, who was working with the Coalition for Educational Justice (CEJ), to organize parents at schools that were on the closure list to try to save their schools. CEJ is a collective that works toward creating educational equity in the system at the citywide level. I joined the fight because I had a historical understanding of where my school had been and the wonderful things that were possible there. When people are flippant about closing a school, it wounds me. I think about who I might not have been if I hadn’t been able to sing in that glee club. The school gives young people a foundation. School closure is devastating. The school is the heart of the community. Everything dear to me either happened in PS 298 or happened because of that school. I was able to go to college and pay for part of it through a music scholarship because I started singing in the third grade in the glee club. When people are flippant about closing a school, it wounds me. I think about who I might not have been if I hadn’t been able to sing in that glee club. The school gives young people a foundation. When a school is slated for closure, no one asks the really hard questions: Why aren’t students achieving? What will it take for them to achieve? And what are the ‘experts’ doing wrong? All the blame falls on all the wrong people. It’s ‘the kids don’t care, the parents don’t care, and even the teachers don’t care’ – and none of that is true, nor is it the true source of any of the problems. Often when a school closes, another one opens in the same building with the same students, and the same horrible things just keep occurring. We began to organize other parents to save the school. Fiorella and CEJ helped me understand that school closure was a deeper, citywide, and even state-wide issue. She helped me to articulate an alternative vision for what could be possible for our school. I vowed that I would make PS 298 a community school if it’s the last thing I do. By organizing, we saved the school, and after the election of Mayor Bill de Blasio, PS 298 became a community school through New York City’s Renewal School Program. The city’s Department of Education started the program to transform low-performing schools into community schools with 63 extended school days, mental health services, support from and for families, and extensive partnerships with community organizations. I was over the moon about it. PS 298 is now doing great and has the resources it should have had all along. The school has been able to improve attendance and raise student proficiency rates. The principal has created an environment where students are excited about being in school. PS 298 is now much more like the school I attended as a child. MEETING THE NEEDS OF THE WHOLE CHILD After saving PS 298, I continued working with the Coalition for Educational Justice and became a leader with their state-wide partner, the Alliance for Quality Education. Then I was hired as the CEJ coordinator. CEJ is the largest parent-led group in New York City and comprises community-based organizations across all five boroughs that organize parents in black, brown, and immigrant communities. For example, the Queens parent committee of Make the Road New York advocates for school construction, because their schools are so overcrowded that many students have to take classes in temporary trailers. These groups push for change in an individual school or district, but there’s only so much that a district superintendent or school principal can do without systemic change, especially in a system with more than seventeen hundred schools and mayoral control. [W]e envision community schools as a hub for services that address the needs of the community at large, but specifically the needs of the student and family population at the school. Where there is a need for a dental clinic, mental health services, a food pantry, or laundry services, those things are made available to families. At CEJ we envision community schools as a hub for services that address the needs of the community at large, but specifically the needs of the student and family population at the school. Where there is a need for a dental clinic, mental health services, a food pantry, or laundry services, those things are made available to families. We believe that by taking care of the needs of students and families, students will be more successful in schools; their test scores, grades, and attendance will all improve. For example, if you give a student a pair of glasses, they see better and they perform better academically. Similarly, if students are not hungry, they can focus better in class. Then we took it to the next level: if you can do all those things while also dissecting teaching and learning and improving everyday practices in the classroom, you will get the long-term systemic change that children need. STRONG PARENT ENGAGEMENT We want parents to be full partners in community schools. We see a relationship between intentional, strong parent engagement and what happens in the classroom. We brought the Academic ParentTeacher Teams model into NYC schools with the help of the educational non-profit WestEd. These teams hold parent-teacher conferences in a new and dynamic way. Schools traditionally conduct fifteenminute parent-teacher conferences with individual families. In the new model, a teacher brings together all parents into the classroom, and together they look at achievement data and discuss the key skills that students need before advancing to the next grade. All the parents work with the teacher to set both classroom and individual goals for their children. For example, the teacher may say, ‘We are working on growing the class’s vocabulary by two hundred words, and this is how we’re going to do it together as a team.’ The teacher and parents figure out how to work together to achieve the goal, and the teacher identifies resources, games, and activities that parents can use at home to help their children. At these meetings, parents have an opportunity to build a stronger 64 relationship with the teacher and also with each other. The last Academic Parent-Teacher Team meeting of the school year discusses how to set students up for success in the following year by coming up with ways to sustain learning through the summer vacation. How do you build strong relationships between the community and the school? How do you begin to shift how teachers view parents, how parents view teachers, and how each of them views young people? How do you grow the relationship academically? With our approach, the school asks parents to perform a teaching skill to reinforce academic practice and gives them the tools and support to be able to do that. Now you have a whole classroom full of parents who are immersed in learning and teaching practice. It is no longer just a one-sided equation; you have begun to equalize the relationship. COMMUNITY SCHOOLS What’s different about a community school? When you walk in the door, you may first notice that there are a lot more resources and more hands on deck. A community school director coordinates the afterschool programs, the medical clinics, and other services. This role allows principals to focus on being instructional leaders and allows the director to take on more of the social-emotional and support work. You may see more parents in the building, because there are more workshops in such areas as English as a second language or Spanish as a second language, depending on what parents communicate that they want or need. Community schools provide an extra hour of instruction to students and offer a variety of after-school programs. At their best, community schools feel more vibrant. The adults are happy to be there, so the students are happy to be there. Students report that it’s more fun to be in their school. I have found that when a school lacks vibrancy, or where the adults aren’t invested, it bleeds over to the students. At a community school, teachers and other adults have a renewed sense of excitement about being in the building. SCHOOLS THAT REFLECT THE COMMUNITY The teaching force in New York City is over 60 percent white, while 85 percent of students are children of color. Students across the city and even across the country don’t see themselves reflected in their teachers, nor do they see themselves reflected in the books they read. Parents of color, especially immigrant families, are viewed as not caring about their children. I have seen Spanish-speaking families flat-out ignored. The school considers it a bother to find someone who speaks their language, so non-English-speaking parents cannot have a robust conversation about their children’s academic performance. The white-supremacist belief system that devalues communities of color is responsible for what is happening in schools and in communities that have seen complete disinvestment. For decades, no one cared about schools in Brownsville, Brooklyn; they ignored and underfunded them. Without a strong challenge, this belief system continues to be reinforced, even in community schools. We work extremely hard to shift how teachers and school staff view families so that they treat them as assets. We work to shift deficit thinking to asset-based thinking, and we help educators they are saying. We work extremely hard to shift how teachers and school staff view families so that they treat them as assets. We work to shift deficit thinking to asset-based thinking, and we help educators learn to listen to parents and hear what they are saying. learn to listen to parents and hear what Another parent engagement model that we have brought to New York City is the Parent Teacher Home Visit. Teachers go through training, and then they call the family to set up a visit. The meeting can take 65 place anywhere other than the school, such as in the neighborhood library. Teachers and staff need to know the communities where they are working. They can get to know families on a whole different level when they are not on the teacher’s turf. Teachers might ask, ‘Tell me about yourself. Tell me about your child. What are your hopes and dreams? What do you want them to get out of this year?’ Teachers learn about the family and student as people, something they would not have been able to do if the conversations were solely about test scores. ‘I actually know someone at this school. If something happens, I have someone I can talk to.’ Home visits create new kinds of connections between schools, families, and communities. Families immediately feel more comfortable with those teachers. Parents say, ‘I actually know someone at this school. If something happens, I have someone I can talk to.’ Home visits create new kinds of connections between schools, families, and communities. ELECTORAL POWER In 2013 CEJ launched a campaign to make improving public education a key issue in New York City’s mayoral race. How do we shift away from the punitive school-closure model and toward infusing resources and support into struggling schools? We wanted to steer candidates toward community schools as a solution. We took a good-guy/bad-guy approach – or, as I like to say, it was like a Labrador retriever and a pit bull. The Labrador is sweet, and you want to build a good relationship with her. The pit bull is the opposite. The bad guy, or pit bull, was New Yorkers for Great Public Schools. NYGPS created wedge issues in public education to move candidates as far away as possible from Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s policies of school closures, charter schools, and disinvestment. The closer you were to supporting the damaging things he did, the worse it seemed for you. NYGPS held continuous press conferences to keep the wedge issue in the news, to elevate public education as one of the top voter issues in the city. The Labrador was ‘PS 2013’, our campaign to uplift positive policy solutions. The coalition operated an online policy hub that talked in depth about changing outcomes for students of color. It featured the best things to do for students with special needs and promoted community schools. Contributors created policy papers that were just two or three pages long, making them accessible to a cross-section of readers. We also ran a citywide charrette, or intensive planning process, which involved more than seventy-five community meetings with parents, students, community members, teachers, principals, and superintendents around the city. We asked questions like ‘What would you like to see in your ideal school?’ and ‘What are the things you would want the next mayor to do for public education?’ These were simple but direct questions that helped identify what people wanted to see happen. It is amazing how simple the questions are, yet they are often never asked. Community members wanted art, music, and better physical education. They wanted more robust community services and better school food. These are all core tenets of community schools. We then took the top twenty things that people wanted to see in their schools, and we created an installation in a bright blue bus that traveled around the city, providing an attractive container for all these ideas. Each idea had a different basket, and people would walk through the bus with a packet of tokens and vote for what they wanted to see in their schools. It was a way of engaging folks in a democratic process that is very much missing with public education in New York, because we have mayoral control instead of elected community school boards or local governance. 66 With the help of a design team of policy experts, we put out a road map for the next mayor that highlighted all the top ideas, including community schools. All the major candidates came to the mayoral forum at which we presented our platform. Throughout this time, parents from CEJ had been meeting with elected officials and with candidates to raise our issues. CEJ cannot endorse candidates, but we have the power to meet with folks and put before them a platform supporting community schools. Because of all the talk and energy behind our campaign, candidates started to endorse community schools as an important strategy. Mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio pledged to open 100 community schools in his first term. De Blasio won the 2013 mayor’s race, and by the end of his first full school year he transformed 130 schools into community schools; since then he has added nearly 100 more. VICTORY These are black, brown, and immigrant families, and some of the leaders are monolingual Spanish speakers. We are not the usual folks who influence mayoral candidates. Our ability to influence the mayoral race in such a pivotal way speaks volumes to the impact of community organizing and to our vision for community schools. The fact that parents were so pivotal at bringing the community school model to New York City was a huge victory. These are black, brown, and immigrant families, and some of the leaders are monolingual Spanish speakers. We are not the usual folks who influence mayoral candidates. Our ability to influence the mayoral race in such a pivotal way speaks volumes to the impact of community organizing and to our vision for community schools. Mayor Bill de Blasio’s victory did not mean we could just walk away. After calling for 130 community schools, we began to support the transition of traditional schools to the new model, implement new parent-teacher relationships, and improve the quality of the instruction in those schools, among other initiatives. We recently shifted our attention to another part of our community school platform: culturally responsive education. Now is the time for school communities to go deeper and shift their curricula to better represent and engage the history and culture of the students of color they serve. LESSONS FOR ACTIVISTS Getting someone to say they will create community schools is the easy part. The hard part is this: after they say yes, then what? There are three lessons to take away from our community school campaign in New York. The first lesson is that even when you have a friendly administration that is seemingly giving you what you want, the work doesn’t stop. It shifts and changes and gets harder. Never let up. The second lesson is to be thoughtful and mindful about the type of schools and the number of schools your organization can support. New York has more than 1,700 schools, so even the current total of 225 community schools does not seem like a lot. But that actually is a lot of schools to have taken on all at once; in fact, it is the largest school improvement plan in the country. And because these were some of the schools that struggled most in the city, we were asking a lot of them. In hindsight, I think creating smaller cohorts and building a bit more slowly would have worked better. Our children cannot wait, but they also deserve strong improvements that will work. The third lesson is that planning is critical. I think we should have pushed for implementation to start after a planning year. The schools had little knowledge about how to transition to the new model, community-based organizations did not always know the best ways to support the schools, and there 67 was no real training for community school resource directors. There needed to be a strong planning year when staff could learn their roles before diving into the deep end. Better preparation increases the likelihood of success. A bonus lesson is that you must have your own definition of success. If you leave it up to your critics, they will never say you’re successful. If you leave it up to test scores, those scores will not tell the full story. A bonus lesson is that you must have your own definition of success. If you leave it up to your critics, they will never say you’re successful. If you leave it up to test scores, those scores will not tell the full story. Start by figuring out in year one what success means. How does that shift in year two, and year three, and year four? What are all the measures of success that matter beyond test scores? We must make community schools high quality, always raising the bar. Those are our babies, nieces, nephews, and our neighbors’ children in those classrooms. We want to make them the best that they can be. 68