Promising Practices In Afterschool Collaboration:
What It Takes To Make School-Community Collaboration Work

A Forum — June 21, 2002

Co-Sponsored by the National Assembly/National Collaboration for Youth

The National Assembly/National Collaboration will soon issue a report on collaboration in afterschool programming, featuring three sites that have been part of a two-year review, including information on case study visits to each site. At today’s forum, Irv Katz, President and CEO, National Assembly/National Collaboration for Youth, described the guiding principles behind this report and indicated that the three featured panelists—one from each case study site—would provide their own views on collaboration, including an urban perspective, a rural perspective and the perspective of a partner who is also an evaluator of the project. While we have all heard before about collaborative efforts, Katz reminds us that these are exemplary sites that are representative of the Assembly’s findings on collaboration in 21st Century Community Learning Centers.

Julie Leutenegger from the YMCA of Metropolitan Milwaukee, WI, Downtown Branch, discussed the efforts of the School Community Integrated Services Network (SCISN). SCISN is a non-profit organization comprised of 673 members from 159 organizations with a common goal of supporting Community Learning Centers (CLCs) and Neighborhood Community Schools. CLCs were designed to be afterschool community-based organizations. The focus of the CLCs are to assist students with academic needs or those with poor school attendance by integrating academics with social growth, volunteer service, and civic engagement. Leutenegger discussed four types of collaboration:

1. Funding. Collaborating to assist the CLCs often involves soliciting funds from a variety of sources, for example small businesses and principals using day school funds to help assist the afterschool programs.
2. Planning. At the CLCs, staff members meet monthly to share ideas and discuss problems or changes that need to be made within the program and learning teams are organized to help with such issues as budget, setup, and hiring principals. Everyone has a role to play in improving the skills of children.
3. Volunteers. Another form of collaboration discussed was the wide use of volunteers, for example in developing a buddy-system to ensure the safety of children walking home from the CLC.
4. Sharing Facilities. Children of CLCs also have access to YMCAs which further engages them in constructive activities. Reports show that in the areas where the CLCs are located, the crime rate has gone down during those afterschool hours.

Dr. Mary Hallums, Executive Director of Comprehensive Reform, Sumter, South Carolina, School District #2, says that the challenges they have faced make them unlike any other afterschool reform model. Sumter School District #2 forms a 630 square mile donut around the city of Sumter. The goal of Sumter District #2 is to help the children become active in recreational activities like ballet and football. The academic achievement in Sumter County varies: there are schools with as many as 70% of the students failing, and there are very high achieving schools. Hallums reports that it is a struggle getting people out of the city district to help the students living in rural poverty areas because of the distance between the two. Another problem that the school district faces is the lack of resources needed to continue the efforts of the program. Solutions to the problems have included compensating workers to come out and help, using local partners to meet the needs of the program, rather than relying on more distant partners, and cultivation and nurturing of partnerships over time.

On the eastern end of Sumter, the problems the children face at home are brought into the schools and cause disruption for everyone else. Hallums felt that the exposure that the children on the western side received from traveling and visiting museums helped them to focus on becoming high achievers and committed to staying off of the streets. Having taken the children in Sumter School District #2 to their first restaurant experience, she says “They know that they have added something to the quality of life of their students.”

Dr. Ann M. Foster, Director, Research and Development Center for the Advancement of Student Learning, Poudre, Colorado School District discussed her case study site. The Poudre School District is the size of New Hampshire, with large amounts of poverty contained within communities that have significant financial resources. When collaboration began, the initiators had a vision to expand existing programs, create new ones, and receive resources that they never thought that they could get. In this school district transportation was also a challenge that had to be overcome. Many people came to the first meeting for the program without much information, and their motives for attending varied, which “wasn’t a problem because the different ideas that collaboration brings are a benefit.” With collaboration, the groups were able to develop networking and alliances, but there was always a struggle to reach consensus, causing collaborative efforts to cease.

Questions asked at the forum included the following themes:

• Financing: While dollars are very tight in many states, collaborative efforts were able to solicit voluntary donations, stretch existing resources, and gain the support of municipal officials.
• Faith-based assistance: Faith-based groups provided mentoring and funding assistance, individuals to serve on advisory committees, and often ran their own after-school programs.
• Community service: The Poudre site provided an example of community service—students teaching senior citizens about technology.

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