Community schools partner to reach new students
By CASEY MALISZEWSKI, Published October 12, 2009

Alliances between community colleges and community schools—which work with multiple organizations to provide an array of services and support to children, families and the community—offer a unique opportunity for both institutions to better serve their service areas.

Community colleges today face unique challenges, including using limited resources to serve a growing student body that is increasingly diverse. Partnerships between colleges and community schools are a creative solution that helps bridge resources to better serve the public.

Like two-year colleges, many communities are growing increasingly diverse through rising immigrant populations. This changing demographic presents a new challenge to community colleges in reaching members of the new community. One particular issue arises with a differing population: learning about the new needs of the area.

In Pennsylvania, Northampton Community College (NCC) uses a community school partnership to help address this. NCC President Art Scott notes the advantage community colleges have through partnering with community schools. Working with community schools offers community colleges an avenue to gain knowledge about these new communities, he said.

“We also know that we’ll be able to provide better collegiate-level instruction if we better understand the families that we serve. That helps us do our work,” Scott said.

Colleges can work with community schools in several ways. Many two-year colleges that currently partner with community schools offer a variety of classes at the schools, such as financial planning, adult literacy, GED preparation and nutrition. It is common for community colleges to provide service learning volunteers to tutor students. NCC takes its partnership further by serving as the lead partner with Fountain Hill Elementary School (FHES). An NCC representative—called a site coordinator and whose salary is covered primarily by a local United Way grant—works with the community school and other partners to coordinate services, making them accessible to children and families at FHES.

Some immigrants might come from countries where education was difficult to obtain. They may hesitate to even walk into a community college, even if they want to explore educational opportunities. Offering adult education and literacy classes at the local community schools can help new immigrants overcome this fear.

“The advantage of putting an adult literacy class in the schools is we create an opportunity for parents to become role models for their children by learning and studying in the same building,” says Paul Pierpoint, NCC’s vice president of community education. “They all become comfortable in the facility and come to recognize the school as their own.”

Another benefit of working with community schools is the opportunity to introduce children of all ages to college. Partnerships with community schools foster “great connections for kids to start to get the idea of college, being in a college atmosphere, and being able to get comfortable,” says Gail Mrowinski, NCC’s associate dean of community education.

These kinds of community approaches can become a great asset as community colleges work toward President Obama’s goal of the U.S. becoming, once again, the country with the highest percentage of college graduates in the world by 2020.

They offer a strategic alignment that provides schools and children a greatly needed resource. Having college volunteers that tutor, mentor or help schools in other ways has a long-term impact on the community by helping more children succeed and secure a stronger future. In NCC’s service area, for example, where high school graduation rates are as low as 70 percent in some schools, partnering with community colleges is an essential step to reversing this trend and improving education for all.

 “I think every college and university could be an important contributor to the community schools movement,” Scott says. “Colleges have a lot of talent and resources to share with their neighborhood schools, and they also have the presence in the community to bring other organizations into the partnership.”

Maliszewski writes on behalf of the Coalition for Community Schools.