Midterm Project: School/Community Relations Analysis ...



Midterm Project: School/Community Relations Analysis/Cultural Scan of Cornwall-Lebanon School DistrictCarlos Carmona, MS, NCSPCornwall-Lebanon School DistrictMillersville UniversityAuthor NoteThis project is part of the requirements for EDLD 614Midterm Project: School/Community Relations Analysis/Cultural Scan of Cornwall-Lebanon School DistrictThe Cornwall-Lebanon School District (CLSD) is located in the south-central part of Lebanon County, Pennsylvania. The district is composed of the townships of South Lebanon, North Cornwall, West Cornwall, and North Lebanon, in addition to the boroughs of Cornwall and Mount Gretna, and a portion of the city of Lebanon known as Fairview Heights Annex. In total, the school district spans 70 square miles comprised of more than 31,000 residents. CLSD has a student population of approximately 4,700. With such a student population, the Cornwall-Lebanon School District is the largest of six school districts in Lebanon County. Located centrally to the county, the Lebanon County Career and Technology Center is located within its boundaries. Among the communities and industries within the school district: retirement communities, nursing homes and personal care communities, Lebanon Seaboard Corporation, New Penn Motor Express, Inc., GPU Energy, AES Ironwood (natural gas power plant), the Daniel Weaver Company (Lebanon bologna), several smaller companies, several business parks and many excellent farming operations. A community-based educational foundation, the Falcon Foundation, supports and enhances educational and enrichment opportunities (social, cultural, and athletic) for all people in the Cornwall-Lebanon community (Cornwall-Lebanon School District, n.d.). With so many constituents, CLSD has developed a District Comprehensive Plan 2015- 2018 (DCP) which enables communication and collaboration, encourages shared practices and resources, and certifies that every stakeholder is working toward common goals (Cornwall-Lebanon School District, n.d.). The ultimate goal of the district is “to empower students to reach their individual potential.” The purpose of this report is to provide an analysis of CLSD’s school-community relations within the context of Epstein (2009) six types of involvement that nurture school, family, and community partnerships as well as partnership-building principals. To this end, this paper will identify strengths and weaknesses and propose an action plan for areas of improvement.OverviewOne of the shared values, of a total of 10, identified by CLSD in the District Comprehensive Plan includes the community. CLSD states that it is committed to “promoting active parental and community involvement which create a healthy district culture.” This is a vital value because research indicates a strong relationship between family involvement and improved academic performance (Appalachia Educational Laboratory at Edvantia, 2005). There are many ways for schools to strengthen their partnerships with families and the community. Epstein (p. 14, 2009) proposes six types of involvement that helps educators develop more comprehensive programs of school and family partnerships: parenting, communicating, volunteering, learning, at home, decision-making, and collaborating with the community. The DCP has listed several activities and strategies to promote the partnership between schools, families, and community. An analysis of how these activities and strategies fit into Epstein’s (2009) six types of involvement and partnership-creating approaches is critical. By doing so, school district can add to the partnership efforts through the identification of areas of need and/or improvement.The District Comprehensive Plan mentions that all grade levels have provided activities that has strengthen relationships between school personnel, parents and communities. A similar assessment is concluded in the areas of home/family communication. The school provides newsletters, school calendar, student handbook, Skyward Parent Portal. These activities fall into Epstein’s Communication type of involvement. In this format, the partnership happens with families about school programs and student progress through effective school-to-home and home-to-school communication.CLSD’s mission statement is to empower students to reach their individual potential. To that end, the district utilizes a school social worker to connect students and their families to community resources. CLSD has community coordination via child care, after school programs, youth workforce development programs, and tutoring. CLSD also states a desire to empower educators to work effectively with parents and community partners. Furthermore, new teacher inductees will tour our community and learn about its diversity.? These forms of activities entail Epstein’s Collaborating with the Community with it efforts in the coordination of community resources and services for students, families, and the school with businesses, agencies, and other groups, and provide services to the community.The District Comprehensive Plan committee has identified needs related to family and community connections with schools. The committee believe that continued efforts to work effectively with parents and community is needed. They noted that while the district staff members are happy with the level of support provided by parents and community, the committee believes that improvement in this area is possible. Another area identified is the increase in the level of engagement of all stakeholders within the district. Part of the goals of CLSD is to fully ensure each member of the district community promotes, enhances and sustains a shared vision of positive school climate and ensures family and community support of student participation in the learning process. CSLD delineated several strategies to improve and promote school-community relations. To buttress the level of support provided by parents and community, the school district plans a number of activities aimed at strengthening school community relationships. By engaging in these activities, the hope is that it will promote a shared vision as well as nurture a pride within the school community.? CLSD wants to continue to build business and school district partnerships. They want to promote projects and activities where schools work together with businesses to develop programs to help ready students for work/careers.? CLSD wants to use social media and other communication tools extensively to communicate the district's mission, vision, values, goals, activities, safety topics, etc. CLSD indicated that they want to review existing community relations activities and make changes in aim of improving those programs. Additionally, the district wants to work with area businesses to create job shadowing opportunities for the students of the district.?Finally, a goal of the district is to work with the local Chamber of Commerce. By working with the members of the Chamber of Commerce, CLSD hopes to develop new internship and cooperative opportunities, identify curricular needs and offer real life business experiences to students.?Summary: Areas of Strengths and Improvement of the Existing School/Family/Community PartnershipsCLSD is to be commended for the development of a District Comprehensive Plan that includes the importance of parental and community involvement. The district understands that such stakeholders help create a healthy educational culture and vibrant community. The district also recently hired a social worker to help connect students and their families to community and state resources. The social worker is instrumental with helping families navigate the labyrinth of bureaucracies. The district wants to continue to do better in his efforts to strengthen relationship with parent and other community members at the school level. CLSD has key strategies to reach their parent-community relationship goals. Among the strategies are on-going activities to entice community members to partake in the milieu of the school communities, partner with business to help prepare students for the world of work, use social media to promote and brand itself, and collaborate with the Chamber of Commerce to enhance the curriculum and provide real-life experience in business to students. While these endeavors are beneficial, there are some gaps that exists in the parental and community involvement objective. The activities that were listed above, both ongoing and aspirational, tend to focus on the Epstein involvement types of Communicating and Collaborating With the Community. In the quest to continually improve the quality of education to its students, I propose several activities to help meet the identified gaps.CLSD can improve in developing four (4) of the six (6) types of involvements that are not very developed: Parenting, Volunteering, Learning at Home, and Decision-Making.Parenting involves assisting families in understanding child and adolescent development and in setting home conditions that support children as students at each grade level. Parenting also helps school personnel understand the families they serve (Epstein, p. 152, 2009). By engaging with Parenting students improve attendance when families are informed of policies and involved in meeting attendance goals. Besides the Title 1 Reading nights for parents that exist, CLSD should provide workshops for parents to help children improve their math skills. Such workshops allow the educators to explain to parents the new math standards and tests and to demonstrate and discuss how math skills are taught to student. Parents who participate in the math workshops indicated a change in their viewpoints about learning mathematics (Eisenreich & Andreasen, 2016). Such workshops gave parents the chance to involve be in mathematics in ways similar to the way their children learn in the classroom, beliefs about mathematics were challenged. Parents learned effective ways to help their children and allow them to come up with their own strategies. Volunteering is also a vital component of strengthening the partnership between school, families, and community. In this type of involvement, the focus is on the improvement of recruitment, training, and schedules to involve families as volunteers and audiences at the school and in other locations to support students and school programs. Within Volunteering, there are three areas that parents and community members can engage: (1) in schools or classrooms (as aides, tutors, coaches, lectures, chaperones, boosters, mentors, etc.), (2) for schools or classrooms (assisting school programs and student activities from any location), and (3) as audiences (attend assembles, performances, sports events, recognition and award ceremonies, celebrations, etc.). At CLSD, parents and community are more likely to volunteer as audiences. There is a need for quality volunteering efforts to focus on getting family and other community members to volunteer in and for schools. A benefit of activities to cultivate volunteers is that students gain academic skills that are tutored or taught by volunteers. In this way, the work that teachers do with students is enriched by volunteer expertize. An initiative to be intentional in cultivating volunteers can involve having school counselors/school psychologist utilize parents to do filing, answer phone calls, organize meetings. Furthermore, parents could help set up tutoring services, create and maintain guidance website for the district. Parents could bring their varied talents and specializations and interests to the benefit of guidance services (Griffin and Steem, 2010).?A missing type of involvement is that of Learning at Home which entails the involvement of families with their children in learning at home, including homework, other curriculum-related activities, and individual course and program decisions. While some of these activities can happen during parent-teacher conferences and during individual meetings with parents, CLSD would benefit from having a robust and intentional goal of helping parents help support academic goals in the home. These types of activities help students complete more homework in specific subjects. A suggestion to meet this type of family involvement is to institute monthly a morning activity, perhaps prior to the beginning of the school, during which parents have the opportunity to meet with teachers, administrators, and other parents. Parents can engage in discussion with educators on school activities as testing, homework, and reading programs. (Epstein & Salinas, 2004).There are school activities that were not noted on the DCP that should be strengthened and utilized for the betterment of students. For example, each school has a Parent-Teacher Organization which can be capitalized as it is one of Epstein’s types of involvement: Decision Making. With this type of involvement involves the inclusion of families as participants in school decisions, governance, and advocacy. CLSD needs to build upon parent participation and shared leadership. By doing so, students will benefit, since schools are enriched by become aware that families’ views are represented in school decisions as well as benefits linked to policies enacted by parent organizations and committees. References BIBLIOGRAPHY Appalachia Educational Laboratory at Edvantia. (2005). Linking Student Achievement to School, Family, and Community Involvement. Research Brief.Cornwall-Lebanon School District. (n.d.). About Us. Retrieved October 09, 2017, from Cornwall-Lebanon School District. (n.d.). District Level Comprehensive Plan. Retrieved October 11, 2017, from , H. h., & Andreasen, J. J. (2016). Parent workshops focused on mathematics knowledge for parenting (MKP): Shifting beliefs about learning mathematics. Conference Papers -- Psychology Of Mathematics & Education Of North America, 1196-1203. Epstein, J. L. (2009). School, family, and community partnerships: your handbook for action. Thousand Oaks (Calif.): Corwin.Epstein, J. L., & Salinas, K. C. (2004). Partnering with Families and Communities. Educational Leadership, 61(8), 12-18. Griffin, D., & Steen, S. (2010). School-Family-Community Partnerships: Applying Epsteins Theory of the Six Types of Involvement to School Counselor Practice. Professional School Counseling, 13(4), 218-226. doi:10.5330/psc.n.2010-13.218 ................
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