Community night highlights school-business collaboration

Posted in school
by Lorain County Moms

By Kathleen Merryman, McClatchy Newspapers

TACOMA, WASH. — Student Nathan Ortiz stood in front of a cafeteria full of parents, politicians and activists at First Creek Middle School in Tacoma, Wash., and explained what can happen when the school day grows by a few extra hours worth of options.

“You can do all kinds of things like break dancing, which is cool; art class, where they’re making a really big dragon; debate club, which is cool because, instead of yelling at other people, you can do it in a formal way,” he read from his prepared speech.

“You can play outside, like soccer, football and kickball,” he went on. “They help you with homework and give you snacks and check your grades and get on your case and help you until you get your missing work done.”

Nathan aced his assignment at the Lights On After School celebration, making real the concept of a full-service school and helping inaugurate the model at First Creek on Tacoma’s East Side.

Tacoma Schools Superintendent Art Jarvis said the pilot project has grown from the vision of Tacoma 360, a partnership of local government agencies.

“The child is the center, and around the center is everything the child needs,” Jarvis said. “It might be that Colleen struggles with math, or Art struggles just to get to school. We will create the partnerships and mechanisms to reach out and be able to coordinate services for them.”

Tacoma already has shown a growing commitment to after-school programs and extended school hours. In the last few years, they’ve taken root at the Lincoln Center and at Stewart Middle School, the latter under federally funded school reform.

First Creek is taking the idea a step further, and with a different approach: no extra money, but lots of partners.

The Northwest Leadership Foundation is operating it at First Creek with Metro Parks, MultiCare, the YMCA, MESA, College Success Foundation, TRiO, Mentor 253 and Proyecto MoLE.

Julia Garnett, strategic director of Tacoma 360, said the alliance grew out of the realization that the people and the organizations trying to do better by Tacoma need to ramp up their collaborations as funding seeps away.

In March 2010, they started with the basics: an inventory of services already in place. That helped identify the gaps. They involved big players, including the Department of Social and Health Services, hospitals, mental health care providers and schools at the district and individual level.

They now meet quarterly to line the services up where they can work best for most students.

Even with all that collaboration, they can’t do it alone, Jarvis said.

“How do you open the school up to be not only a safe and welcoming place, but a place that says ‘I need you’ to the community?” he said. “Safety, security and a sense of the whole child. To me, that’s the heart. I want to see this place with parents coming and going.”

At First Creek, teachers such as Donna Chang have been doing that from the beginning. They invite parents, community groups and other institutions into the school and onto the grounds during school hours, after school, even weekends.

The after-school science club she leads has her kids testing soil with University of Washington students, weeding with First Creek Neighbors, marking storm drains with conservation groups and drawing relatives in for demonstration projects and fairs.

Principal Brad Brown encourages the community to use the school for meetings and mobilizations, for student dances and after-hours events.

Some kids, Jarvis said, have problems outside school that interfere with their success inside it. Families lose jobs and homes. Parents may be sick. A student may have a mouth full of achy teeth.

A full-service school fills the gaps with people like First Creek counselor Colleen Cline, who can help sort through the needs and reel in the resources.

“If there is a child here, and someone says, ‘This is what he needs,’ then we have an organized way to connect them,” Jarvis said. “If we don’t attend to needs, we can’t assume they are being attended to.”

Expect the full-service school model to bump into tradition, and the money problem, Jarvis said.

“For almost 100 years, we’ve lived in this world of 180 school days, six hours a day,” he said. “I don’t know if those were ever right, but it’s sure not the world we live in now.”

That part-time school tradition may be hard to break. Partnerships may help. Working with parks, foundations and youth programs may allow the school district to put activities into schools through summer and other vacations. That’s a goal for East Siders who lost a low-cost summer camp and Boys and Girls Club last summer.

If First Creek succeeds, look for other schools to want to adapt the model for their students.

“You want to see 360 in every school,” Jarvis said. “We just want to get it rolling.”