A University-Assisted, Place-Based Model for Enhancing Students’ Peer, Family, and Community Ecologies

Abstract

Community schools have recently (re)emerged in the United States as a vital, comprehensive strategy for addressing poverty-related barriers to children's school learning. However, not all low-income school communities are endowed with the resources needed to launch a comprehensive array of school-based/linked services and programs. In this article, the authors describe a place-based model for school improvement for low-income school communities where formal and fiscal resources are in short-supply. Framed by two best-practice interventions from the youth development and family support literatures, the authors identify five "high leverage" improvement mechanisms that social workers, educators, and parents can collaboratively target to affect change. These improvement mechanisms, together with the interventions they implicate, can help community school efforts provide a more powerful, engagement-focused reach into students' peer, family, and community ecologies.

Enhancing the Transfer of Life Skills from Sport-based Youth Development Programs to School, Family, and Community Settings

“…The school re-opened two years ago and now serves nearly 450 students, 87% of which qualify for government-sponsored, free or reduced lunch, indicating the family comes from a low socioeconomic status. Academically, the school ranks below the 30th percentile in student test scores in the state (Lawson, Alameda-Lawson, & Richards, 2016).…”

University–School Partnerships: Successes and Challenges in Designing and Implementing Strategies to Promote Racial Equity

“…Likewise, mutualism is similar to the UACS goal of creating a product that "makes a positive difference for all partners" (p.12, (Harkavy & Hartley, 2009). Like other UACS projects, our place-based model is a participatory approach to school improvement that uses data to inform practice improvement strategies (Lawson et al, 2016). In this paper, we explore successes and challenges in four phases of the research-practice partnership: (1) building the partnership, (2) designing the project, (3) data analysis, and (4) translating the data into action for racial justice.…”

Lessons Learned from an After-School Program: Building Personal and Social Responsibility

“…To wit, this difficulty persists because the norms for expected conduct between settings appear to be more different and competing than they are similar (Jacobs & Wright, 2018). As a result of this mismatch, additional programmatic interventions and supports are needed, especially those that target change in institutional and family-level practices (Lawson, Alameda-Lawson, & Richards, 2016).…”