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  By SUZIE BOSS Look in any direction from Superior, Montana, and you'll see mountains. And trees. Lots of trees. "We're an island, surrounded by forests," says Gordon Hendrick, the 49-year-old mayor of this community of 1,000. There's a river running through the heart of Superior, too, and an interstate highway that winds through the passes to Missoula, about 60 miles away. Since the town was founded a century ago, young people growing up in Superior have looked to those trees for their future. The local mill could be counted on to feed families and generate a tax base to support the town's high school, junior high, and elementary school. But in 1994, a year after Hendrick was elected to his first term as mayor, the mill closed its doors. It had become more cost-effective to ship raw logs overseas for processing. Overnight, Superior was sucked into a downward spiral that's familiar to many rural areas dependent on a single natural resource. Property values plummeted. Unemployment shot up. The local tax base shrank. Schools had to lay off teachers. Some families packed up and moved on to other places where trees would still provide jobs. Many of those who have stayed, says the mayor, have been left feeling "as if the world has let them down." Clearly, Hendrick has his work cut out for him. "How are we going to keep this community energized," he asks himself regularly, "so that we can convince people to stay here? To start new businesses here? So young people won't have to leave town to find jobs?" Those are hard questions, and they're being asked in other distressed communities all across the country. From Oakland to Chicago, from the dairy farms of Tillamook to the cattle country of eastern Washington, communities are looking for local solutions to problems that may have originated halfway around the globe. "Who would have thought," Hendrick says, "that the labor market in Asia would affect people in a little town like Superior?" Instead of wringing his hands in despair, Hendrick is throwing his energy into a new partnership that he hopes will pave the way to a better future. Most days, this small-town mayor can be found at Superior High School where he volunteers his time and expertise to coordinate a thriving school-to-work program. His goal is to link students with real-world employers in health care, social service, banking, and a variety of small businesses. He wants to open their eyes to career options outside of forestry, and make sure they have the education to make new dreams possible. Employers, in turn, have a chance to see that this new generation is a capable, committed workforce with flexible job skills-just the kind of employees they'll need to build a sustainable future in Superior, where money no longer grows on trees. Although folks in Superior sometimes feel isolated from the outside world, they're actually part of a grass- roots movement that's gaining momentum across the country. In some of the nation's most economically challenged neighborhoods, both urban and rural, new partnerships and alliances are forming that blur old boundaries between school, family, jobs, and community. Instead of pushing separate agendas- more jobs, better schools, less crime, improved health care-community members are rallying around the wisdom of working together. Educators, civic leaders, local employers, entrepreneurs, parents, and all the people who make a community their home are beginning to see that collaboration can be in everyone's best interest. Hundreds of miles away from Superior, for instance, residents in one of the nation's poorest urban neighborhoods are living proof of the benefits of partnership. At the start of this decade, Sandtown, a 72-square-block area in Baltimore, was a textbook example of urban decay. Like many other American cities, Baltimore had lost the industrial jobs that once sustained middle-income families. When workers followed jobs to the suburbs, informal networks of friends and kin fell apart. Those left behind found themselves left out of the mainstream, lacking role models, and, often, feeling hopeless about their ability to change their situation.
In the early 1990s, 40 percent of Sandtown's residents lacked high school diplomas and half had annual incomes less than $10,000. The community was riddled with crime, drugs, dilapidated housing projects, vacant lots, and schools that didn't work. But during the last eight years, Sandtown has been rebuilt and revived from the inside out. Local residents, with the help of experts and a strong push from church leaders, have invented better ways to deliver education, job skills, health care, housing- all the diverse elements that function "to support life instead of degrading it," according to Kurt Schmoke, the visionary Baltimore mayor who helped guide Sandtown to real, lasting renewal. Many of the new efforts aim at getting young people better educated and more engaged in improving the community. Writing about this community revitalization in The Washington Post, Schmoke said, "Sandtown is the shape of urban policy to come-a community built through a partnership of residents, religious organizations, the Enterprise Foundation, and all the levels of government." From Superior to Sandtown, and all the places in between, there's new energy in conversations about what sustains and defines communities. Some advocates call this movement "community building," while others refer to "school-linked strategies" or "school-community partnerships." It's not a concept that's owned by any one branch of academics. Instead, researchers from fields ranging from education to economics to sociology are taking notes and, when asked, providing local communities with expertise to get them started on the path to partnership.
So far, experts agree that no one approach works for every community. Multiple strategies are being used, often simultaneously, to meet educational and community development goals. Success is being measured not with charts and graphs, but in stories about community revival, collaborative problem solving, and a deepening sense of place among people who share both geography and values. According to Community Building Coming of Age, a monograph which grew out of a series of seminars on community building and has been published online by the National Community Building Network (NCBN), this renewed sense of partnership offers tangible rewards. Neighbors learn to rely on each other by working together on concrete tasks that take advantage of their collective and individual assets. In the process, they create "human, family, and social capital that provides a new base for a more promising future and reconnection to America's mainstream." Comprehensive school-linked strategies share a number of elements, no matter how different the communities involved, the issues being addressed, or the particular model being implemented. Putting the Pieces Together, published by the U.S. Department of Education and the Regional Educational Laboratory Network, reports that comprehensive strategies:
Even in the most distressed neighborhoods, the primary aim of collaboration is not simply giving more money, services, or other material benefits to the poor. Rather, the goal is "to obliterate feelings of dependency and to replace them with attitudes of self-reliance, self-confidence, and responsibility," according to the Coming of Age authors. IMAGINING NEW MODELS
Since the 19th century, schools have served as the cultural center of rural life, according to Bruce Miller, a former senior research associate at NWREL who has written extensively on rural education. Rural schools give community members a central meeting place and regular opportunities to get together. In many rural areas, the school continues to be the strongest-and sometimes the only-community institution. In cities and suburbs, as well, schools still provide a place for neighbors to meet and greet. Yet, according to a study conducted by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, many schools have become "seriously isolated" from their communities. Urbanization, school consolidations, and a more transient society all share the blame, according to Larry Decker and Mary Richardson Boo. In Community Schools: Linking Home, School, and Community they write, "Since most public schools offer nothing to adults without children, it should not be surprising that many adults are unenthusiastic about supporting public education." Adults who had negative experiences with schools when they were young may feel reluctant to become involved with their children's classes. As a solution, Carnegie researchers urge the development of "exceptionally strong ties" between home, school, and community. Imagining what these new school-community partnerships might look like raises important questions about the role and shape of public education. Should the school become a center for the whole community, delivering education for all ages? If teachers sense that children are not succeeding academically because of issues related to health care, hunger, or housing, should schools be delivering social services along with classroom lessons? Would students be more engaged in learning if they were actively engaged outside the classroom walls, mastering life skills while contributing to the life of the community? If economic issues are paramount to community survival, should schools act as springboards for entre- preneurship, using students' fledgling skills and youthful energy to incubate small businesses? Research shows that all of these interrelated approaches can revitalize communities and improve academic achievement. Rather than being something that takes place between the hours of 9 a.m. and 3 p.m., between the ages of five and 18, and within the four walls of the classroom, learning can be reinvented as an activity that engages, defines, unites, and revives the whole community. Miller offers three interrelated models of how schools and communities can intersect:
SCHOOL AS COMMUNITY CENTER. In this first model, the school becomes a resource for lifelong learning and a vehicle for delivering a wide range of services throughout the community. For example, schools might become involved in retraining dislocated workers. School computer labs, idle after the last bell of the day, can be used in the evenings to teach technical skills and connect local families to the information highway. Community schools can also act as resource centers, bringing a variety of social services under one accessible roof and teaching families how to make use of resources. They may stay open into the evening and throughout the year. San Francisco, for instance, operates three "Beacon Schools," open year-round to strengthen families and foster positive youth development. COMMUNITY AS CLASSROOM. In the second model, the traditional classroom walls come down. Students use the entire community as their living laboratory. They may contribute to the life of the community through service projects. They may generate information for community development by conducting surveys or gathering oral histories. Through personal interactions with their adult community members, on their home turf, they gain a deeper understanding of, and psychological connection to, the place they call home.
SCHOOL-BASED ENTERPRISE. In the third model, the school becomes a springboard for local entrepreneurship and business development. Students identify potential service needs and establish a business, such as a day-care center for working families or a shoe-repair shop in a community that doesn't have one, Miller explains. Comprehensive school-based enterprises provide students with supporting curriculum and training. In one community, for instance, students took a fresh look at the resources available locally. An inventory of vacant lots turned up enough discarded wood to launch a student-run business selling firewood. Operating the business meant learning all the lessons, from budgeting to transportation to accounting, that go along with any small enterprise. Using these three interrelated models to create "learning communities" can change the culture of a school and the surrounding community. Researchers report that teachers feel less frustration when they can draw on a community of support to remove barriers to learning. Families and community members begin to relate to the school and its staff with more respect and openness. Although such collaborations are relatively new, acknowledges Dennis Shirley in Community Organizing for Urban School Reform, "encouraging results are there, measured in increased student attendance, improved teacher retention, enhanced academic achievement, and new forms of school innovation and community uplift." Collaborative learning communities may differ in design, but generally, according to Why Should Schools Be Learning Communities?, published by the North Central Regional Educational Laboratory, they:
HOW RELATIONSHIPS
Increasingly, researchers are paying attention to the importance of relationships that naturally exist within all communities, including those that are struggling. Diane Dorfman, in the Building Partnerships Workbook published by NWREL, defines a community not solely as a geographic place, but also by "the relationships in which people interact on an everyday basis." When people share values and interests at local sporting events, over coffee, or even in brief encounters while shopping for groceries, those casual, everyday interactions "allow a community to develop strong bonds and a high level of trust among individuals," asserts Dorfman. In Community Organizing for Urban School Reform, Shirley explains why "social capital" is becoming such a key concept in community development. Unlike physical capital, which describes the value of buildings and infrastructure, or financial capital, which describes the value of money, social capital proposes that certain kinds of relationships possess economic value, Shirley explains. These ties can be formal, as in the case of labor unions or Boy Scout troops, or informal, such as neighbors who get together for a block party or small business owners who watch out for neighborhood kids after school. The relationships most likely to build social capital and advance community development, according to Dorfman, are those that pull people out of familiar roles, such as parent-to-teacher, or employee-to-employer. In active relationships, she explains, parent and teacher leave their usual roles and meet as neighbors, friends, or members of a community development project. They go beyond their familiar roles to work together.
FINDING A
Instead of seeing distressed neighborhoods as places with unmet needs aching for services, these researchers from Northwestern University outline a program for developing local capacities. "Each time a person uses his or her capacity," they assert, "the community is stronger and the person more powerful." John Morefield, a former Seattle elementary school principal and board member of a community coalition called Powerful Schools, points out the critical difference between seeing people as "needy" and as "needed." Building community partnerships, he explains in an essay called "Recreating Schools for All Children," means starting with the premise "that everyone has something to give others," no matter how poor the neighborhood. "Everyone is needed by someone. Many people who learn how to be needy seldom, if ever, experience the power of being needed." How can a community go about identifying the abilities and gifts of its members? Kretzmann and McKnight describe an approach they call "asset mapping." Although their work focuses primarily on urban areas, NWREL's Rural Education program has been using a similar approach for developing the local capacity of rural communities. An asset map is an inventory of the gifts, skills, and capacities of all the citizens who make up a community, whether it's an urban pocket of Chicago or a farming community in rural Idaho. Especially in places where economic forces have left citizens feeling marginalized or without worth, asset mapping reminds them that they have skills to offer, that their opinions matter to the community, that they are not needy, but needed. Mapping a community's assets involves taking stock of all the relationships within a community. Informal citizen groups are as valuable for community-building as are the more formal institutions, such as schools, hospitals, and chambers of commerce. Thinking about communities in this way requires seeing people differently. None of us, after all, plays just one role in life. Finding local assets means asking one another, What is it we're good at? What are we willing to give to each other? What would we appreciate receiving back? What do we care about?
GETTING STARTED
This approach may be too slow. Staff involved in NWREL's rural leadership development effort have found what community developers in larger cities have also discovered. Initial planning shouldn't take too long. Concrete projects that engage community members also help build relationships that, in turn, build local capacity. In the rural Washington community of North Franklin, for example, one of the NWREL pilot sites, citizens seemed to be getting frustrated during the early stages of the project. They complained about spending too much time in community meetings. They wanted to get started on something concrete, something to do now. Unexpectedly, a group of local cattlemen came to a community meeting looking for partners to help them build a livestock arena for local youth. This turned out to be a watershed event for the community. Here was an active association of folks who hadnreally been identified as a local resource. Yet, they were eager to link up with others in the community and do something positive and tangible to benefit young people. This effort to build partnership helped lead to a new collaborative organization called Partners for Achieving Community Excellence (PACE). Because partnerships involve new ways of working and relating in a community, they can provoke controversy. Some community members may think that such programs dilute the primary instructional mission of schools, according to the Putting the Pieces Together guidebook. Similarly, teachers who see collaborations as "one more thing" that they have to do may understandably feel overwhelmed. Keeping schools open for longer hours, as community centers, may leave educators feeling as if their turf has been invaded. If students are participating in extended learning projects, they may draw criticism from community members unaccustomed to seeing young people out and about during the school day. Good communication can ease the way to building lasting partnerships that make sense to everyone in a community. In Putting the Pieces Together, these proactive efforts are recommended to smooth the way for lasting, productive partnerships:
Online resources: Community Building Coming of Age (http://www.urban.org/community/combuild.htm); Putting the Pieces Together: Comprehensive School-Linked Strategies for Children and Families (http://www.ncrel.org/sdrs/areas/issues/envrnmnt/css/ppt/putting.htm); Community Schools: Linking Home, School, and Community (http://eric-web.tc.columbia.edu/community/community_schools/)
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Date of Last Update: 9/28/01 
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