Executive Director's Report: Can a school become the center of its community?

10/28/03 -- Over the past several months, a group of organizations have come together to discuss one of my favorite concepts for K-12 education -- that schools become centers of our communities.

In many towns, especially in rural America, the school is the center of the community. But in many of our urban and suburban districts, the school is a discreet building that is open from 7 in the morning until 4 in the afternoon, Monday through Friday, September through June.

Having a school building open just for schooling not only fails to make the most of the facility. It fails to address what we know to be true -- communities need schools as much as schools need communities.

In addition to NSBA, some of the organizations involved in the effort to promote schools as the centers of their communities include the American Institute of Architects, U.S. Conference of Mayors, National Governors Association, National League of Cities, Generations United, Coalition of Community Schools, Rural School and Community Trust, American Federation of Teachers, and the Public Education Network.

This group of leaders has met twice. I am honored to co-chair it along with Richard Riley, former secretary of education.

The initiative is sponsored by Knowledge Works, an enterprise that has been working diligently to bring together community leaders, school leaders, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to create new high schools designed for the 21st century.

In the coming fiscal year -- even as enrollment levels off at 53.6 million children -- there are plans to build 1,580 new schools, costing around $29 billion. That's an impressive figure.

As these new schools are developed, and many more are built and renovated over the coming years, we have an opportunity to rethink what we mean by school as the center of the community.

What if schools not only provide education for schoolchildren but serve as recreational centers for senior citizens? What if they are the places where local residents come for health care services and exercise classes? What if schools are viewed as lifelong learning centers for the entire community?

To me, it makes a lot of sense to create such institutions, but it is a radical change in the way most schools are developed, because it means the planning for such facilities would require extensive community input from the get go.

The local mayor, town council, and community-based organizations that serve adults and children all would need to be involved.

Architects who have made their living from designing a certain set of school specs would have to change their thinking about what constitutes a school. And in many cases, zoning laws would have to be changed.

In a concept paper on the issue, Kevin Sullivan, the lead staffer for the coalition of groups, writes that efforts to create community schools "have placed new emphasis on the important role that citizens should play in the design of new schools and on building new facilities that are protective of children's health, energy efficient, and sustainable." All this creates "an opportunity to encourage integrated planning and smart growth thinking."

So what I'm talking about is not simple. In the short term, it's probably a lot more work. But in the long term, the schools will become a community investment.

Local residents will begin to look at schools as the place where we all come together to reconnect and make the community strong. This creates a buy-in from many different organizations and community groups. What is now a discreet health clinic, community pool, or even a performing arts center can be incorporated into the design of a facility that also houses the school.

All the community support generated by the community schools concept will be important when the next school bond levy appears on the ballot.

Now, do we have to concentrate on creating a place where children, teachers, and other staff have the best learning environment? Of course, that has to be our number-one objective. Do we need to ensure that our schools are safe, supportive, and nurturing? Of course we do. Do they need to incorporate the latest technology so our children will be exposed to 21st century skills? You bet.

So why do this? Why rethink the purpose of the school building? First of all, we get a broader public buy-in. Second, and maybe even more important, we would be leveraging the investment that we make in buildings and bricks. And third, from the very inception, we would be creating smarter buildings that connect to real community needs.

By reaching out to our communities, we would end up having richer, more flexible and more creative school sites. And we will begin to build the kind of community collaboration that we talk about in NSBA's strategic vision and in several recent NSBA publications, including Communities Count and The Community Connection, which lay out a framework for community engagement.

The work of actually developing and creating a school that serves the community's needs makes all those conversations become very real.

There are school districts across the country that are already making this happen:

• In Chicago, the school system, in partnership with the Polk Brothers Foundation, has launched an ambitious five-year campaign to create 100 community schools.

• Three rural communities in North Brunswick, Maine, banded together six years ago to design and build Noble High School. The school's 1,000 students are divided among 15 "communities." The school also includes space for a health clinic, a student-run restaurant, a day care center, and one of the region's largest performing arts theaters.

• And in Los Angeles, a group called New Schools Better Neighborhoods is leading a collaborative effort to develop the $55 million Gratts New Primary Center, a complex that will include a school for 380 students, a child care center, and 54 units of low-income, special needs housing.

"Yet for all the progress that has been made," Sullivan says, "the links between the many efforts to improve public education and those that encourage community renewal are not as strong as they could be at a time when public education is under increasing public scrutiny and communities remain hard pressed."

School leaders and city officials too often fail to pool their resources or see the possibility of the public school as "a larger civic institution," he says. And advocates for community schools and after-school programs have not had much contact with architects and reformers who are rethinking the design of new schools.

Those who work inside school walls often say they can't be asked to solve all of the problems of poverty, homelessness, or broken families. And it's true that schools can't solve all those problems.

But if public school advocate think of schools more as community centers, maybe we could lead the drive to begin to change the communities and neighborhoods our schools serve.

Oh yes, there's another reason to begin thinking about schools as the centers of the community: It's the right thing to do.