In 1991, eight schools received funding to carry out a 3-year locally designed family and community involvement project. This multisite collaborative action-research project aims to identify school policies and practices that obstruct or advance effective family-school-community partnerships. Data gathering and analysis are being carried out at…

The San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) Summit that focused on the education and academic achievement of African American students was unique because the school district and the African American community came together as partners to seek ways to improve the educational status of African American students. This report tells the story of…

This summer institute was specifically designed to give the Wai'anae community in Hawaii a chance to share ideas that would strengthen the support for all of their youth. It also gave them a chance to learn about resiliency, which is defined as "a person's capacity to survive through life's difficulties." Resiliency can be fostered in youth by…

The Charles Stewart Mott Foundation has been involved in the community-school/community-education movement since the 1935 Flint Community Schools (Michigan) experiment led to fuller use of local school facilities for learning and recreation programs. The National Center for Community Education (NCCE) was established in the 1960s as a training…

In rural coastal communities, trade-offs between conserving and developing environmentally sensitive resources are acute. At the community level, part-time volunteers and citizen officials are asked to make complex decisions based on ambiguous and frequently contradictory "scientific" evidence of economic and environmental relationships.…

The pilot Ecumenical Child Health Project tested ways to coordinate local church activities aimed at improving young children's access to health care. Within a year, coordinators at 3 pilot sites had succeeded in initialing or enhancing several activities that linked health care to more than 1000 families and children living in medically…

This digest briefly discusses some ways to involve families in their children's drug prevention education. Helping children and teenagers stay away from drugs and those who use and sell drugs is an important job in which parents and other close relatives play the most important role. Because youth experiment with drugs for the same reasons they…

This document consists of the first two issues of a brief (usually 6-page) serial publication highlighting the Making After-School Count initiative, programs across the country wherein communities and schools cooperate to serve children after school hours. The June 1998 issue discusses a teleconference discussion with Vice President Al Gore to…

In 1997, Governor Terry Branstad appointed 14 Iowa citizens, educators, and leaders to a special commission to create a vision and roadmap for the state's prekindergarten through 12th grade educational system. Working groups assisted the commission by addressing issues and drafting recommendations in four key areas: high expectations for students,…

This writing resource book offers ideas for sharing stories, turning them into text, and reaching a wider audience through simple publishing processes in community settings and through group processes. Chapter 1 shows how the "Building Canberra" project, on which the book is based, came about. It discusses the policy framework in which…

This document is North Carolina's response to Turning Points: Preparing Youth for the Twenty-first Century, a national report by the Carnegie Council Task Force on Young Adolescents. Turning Points urged state governments to build consensus and strengthen the capacity of local communities to improve middle grade schools. This document responds by…

This paper addresses the need for research in relation to Aboriginal students in locations geographically distant from formal education services. The principles and policies of the Aboriginal Education Policy (AEP) have secured funding for Northern Territory Aboriginal education projects. These principles include: (1) the involvement of Aboriginal…

This booklet outlines the principles of a New Compact for Learning between families, communities, and schools in New York. Its main ideas are that: (1) all children can learn and contribute to their families and communities; (2) parents, teachers, and other community members must work together to help children learn; (3) a society must demand the…

This handbook is for volunteer tutors, student interns, and VISTA volunteers working with adult basic education (ABE) and English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) learners. The community-based handbook contains information about adult literacy and tutoring--what tutors do, who the learners are, and how the literacy learning process works. Introductory…

What can be done to solve the problem of crime in schools? "Project Freedom," in Wichita, Kansas, is creating programs to help children learn about dangers that come with joining gangs and becoming involved in drugs. A community program in Los Angeles, Community Youth Gang Services," is a crisis intervention team working with…