Authentic Community Engagement Becoming Even More Important for Schools

Few, if any, public schools have managed to provide quality experiences for children without high levels of community support.  If you click on Jamie Vollmer's website, the first thing you see is the quote, "No expenditure of our tax dollars yields as high a return as our investment in public schools."  Vollmer didn't used to believe this.  In 1988 he was asked by Dr. William Lepley, Iowa's Secretary of Education, to join the Iowa Business and Education Roundtable.  Before becoming an advocate for public education, he was a harsh critic.

In his first two years as Director of the Roundtable, he visited dozens of schools, met with hundreds of educators, and interacted with advocates from every point on the political spectrum.  One of the first "aha moments" for Vollmer was a realization of the increasing number of things that have become the responsibility of public schools.  In what has come to be known as Vollmer's List, he names these responsibilities, decade by decade, which balloons from three additional health and nutrition-related expectations in the 1900-1910 decade, to 85 by the early 2000s.  This is captured in his 2010 book Schools Cannot Do It Alone.

In his book he asserts that schools need four things schools need from their communities.  He calls them the Prerequisites of Progress.  They are understanding, trust, permission, and support.

Rather than engaging in a sustained dialogue with their communities, too many schools, which are essentially overwhelmed trying to manage Vollmer's List, only reach out when they need something from them--to pass the budget, to pass a referendum, etc.

Community engagement was always important, but several trends make it more important now than ever.  Parents are more likely to question teachers and schools than in previous generations.  Back in the day, parents rarely said, "Boo," to a teacher or a principal.  I know mine never did.  Since Vollmer joined the roundtable in 1988 there has been a shrinking middle class and an aging population resulting in increased competition for tax dollars.  Technology has geometrically accelerated the pace of change in society.  The current acerbic political tensions in our country are increasingly manifesting themselves in local government.  Of course, there is social media, and, finally, as the chart below from the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report, today's graduates will need different skills and dispositions to be successful in life than was the case only a short time ago.

Preparing students for their futures as opposed to our past looks different than what most parents and tax paying citizens experienced in school.  If the above-referenced prerequisites of progress are not in place, schools don't stand a chance of implementing the complex instructional shifts necessary to meet the needs of today's children.  Schools cannot do it alone.

The Arlington Central School District recognizes this and has begun a process called Arlington Connect.  Arlington Connect is a multi-faceted, community-driven community engagement program that is designed to create a two-way dialogue with the community addressing future driven learning, instructional programming, health and well-being, finances, facilities, and operations.  You can access the video from the first Community Engagement Session, which features my State of the Schools Address and the first round of feedback from the participants, by clicking here (note the program begins about 1:20 into the video).

The process is led by the Arlington Connect Facilitating Team, which provides feedback to the administration and our district partners at Creative Entourage to ensure that we plan meaningful sessions based on what is important to our community.  The feedback from these session drive future topics and workshop activities.  At the end of the process, the Facilitating Team will deliver a report to the Board with its recommendations, and the Board will consider this information as it makes resources allocation decisions and adopts a long-range plan for Arlington that includes a Master Facilities Plan.  Online and phone surveys, community engagement feedback, and focus groups, all combine to inform the process and is analyzed statistically through various methods.

In the absence multiple statistically valid and reliable data points that truly reflect the views of the community as a whole, like the ones that will come from the Arlington Connect process, administrators and Board members often rely on their gut feeling, the handful of Emails received over the weekend, social media pressure, the loudest voice, or perceptions from their own social circles.

People always have more commonalities than differences, and one commonality is a shared concern for the next generation of children.  Through the Arlington Connect process, the Arlington Community School District aims to establish the understanding, trust, permission, and support of the community to boldly create a shared vision for decades to come.