Session 3: Comprehensive Youth and Family Resources
What is it?
Traditional schools are structured to primarily achieve academics goals. However, an increasing number of them find that before students can address those goals, some basic social, emotional, and health needs must be met. Bringing together a combination of core programs and services into schools, has helped fill these roles. Community schools free teachers to teach by streamlining and leveraging resources in a more coordinated, cost effective, and more responsive way to work with youth and families.
Session 3’s primary objectives were to prepare participants to:
1. Relate the importance of coordinating and integrating services for youth and families as part of the philosophy of community schools, based on research identifying the most effective services with the best outcomes for youth that facilitate the five conditions of learning.
2. Identify the importance of partnerships and the attributes and skills needed for developing sustainable partnerships and resources for families and children.
3. Develop key strategies on promoting the importance of and increasing the parent involvement in their children’s education.
Tool Organized by Purpose
| Time |
Purpose |
Description |
Tools |
Notes on Tools |
| 60 min |
Arrival, Breakfast, Welcome |
|
|
|
| 90 min |
Essential Practices of Coordinated and Integrated Services
|
What do we mean by comprehensive family and youth resources? How do effective coordination and integration look? Mini-lecture followed by site-based activities |
|
|
| 90 min |
Mechanisms for Meaningful Partnerships
|
How to choose a partner? What makes partnerships work? How would you assess partnership quotient? Mini-lecture followed by site-based activities |
|
|
| 45 min |
LUNCH - Optional: Roundtable Session on Sustainability
|
|
|
|
| 135 min |
Parent as Key Partners in Building Community Schools
|
Concurrent Sessions seperated by elementary and middle school levels
|
|
|
| |
Parents are Powerful |
How do we define parent involement? How does it look in our community? |
|
|
| |
Parent Capacity for Student Learning
|
Activities and Tools to think about student learning for teachers and parents. |
|
|
| 60 min |
Next Steps by School Teams, Evaluation, and Closing |
Schools have time to plan with next steps worksheet |
 S3 Tool - Next Steps-JGC.doc |
|
| |
|
|
|
|
Additional Resources from the orginal session June 2004
Agenda:
S3 Agenda.doc
Training Design:
S3_040604_Training_Design.doc
Tools:
S3 Tool - Target Audience Assessment.doc
S3 Tool - Assessment for Learning Targets-CCCSP.doc
S3 Tool - Schools and Resilience-WestEd.doc
Samples:
S3_Sample_Parent_Involvement_Fact Sheet-CAS.doc
S3_Sample_Parent_Involvement_in_CAS_Schools.doc
S3 Sample - Service Delivery Models-CAS.doc
S3 Sample - Tip Sheet for Parents-CAS.doc
Group Work:
S3 Group Work - CYFR Survey Results.doc
Evaluation Summary:
S3 Evaluation Summary.doc
Why is it important?
· Community schools show great promise as the best way to promote children’s learning and development. Researcher Joy Dryfoos has synthesized a complex body of research on reducing risk and promoting resilience among children and adolescents and concluded that the single most effective intervention was the development and implementation of schools that integrate the delivery of quality education with needed health and social services.
· Children do better in school when their parents regularly support, monitor, and advocate for their education. Multi-year research has documented the importance of parental involvement in children’s education as a key factor in promoting academic achievement.
· Where key developmental influences work together, positive youth outcomes are enhanced. A 13-year study in ten varied communities by Francis Ianni found that child and adolescent outcomes were enhanced in communities where the key developmental influences (home, school, community resources) combined to provide consistent messages, opportunities, and supports for young people.
Why this module now?
As teams of stakeholders work to turn traditional schools into community schools, they want to add supports, services, and opportunities that respond to the documented needs of children and families. In the sequence of understanding and planning for community schools, this topic comes early because it stands at the heart of the work—identifying resources and services that meet the needs of children and families, protect their well-being, promote overall development, facilitate learning, and are supportive of their educational success.
What did we do?
ACSD teams focused on how to develop comprehensive family and youth resources for their communities. To accomplish this task, each leadership team completed pre-assignments to document the existing services and resources available to youth and families in the community. In addition, specific strategies for effective partnerships were identified, as were strategies for authentic parent involvement.
How did we do it?
· Mini-lectures on essential components of Comprehensive Youth and Family Resources, creating a shared vision, and stages of partnership and relationship development.
· Mini-workshops on parent involvement and engagement and engaging parents in helping assess their children’s learning.
· Team activities focused on using tools that helped teams to create a shared vision, assess their partnership quotient, and identify specific steps to take their partnership to the next level.
Reflections and Lessons Learned
· Working in site teams created deep opportunities for planning and creating a shared vision. However, participants may have benefited from more opportunities for cross-site learning because of the different stages of development they were in.
· The mini-workshop on engaging parents as partners in assessing student learning was received with mixed reviews. Some teachers expressed concern that this was not the role of parents or that this approach ventured too far into instruction. Some parents found it hard to connect with the material (although the content was translated into Spanish, it didn’t seem to translate conceptually in a clear way). In addition, service providers found it hard to connect to it, many of whom had not had the experience of being involved in any aspect of student assessment. This content has been tested and found very effective with some sites, so success may depend on the experience and context at a school.
S3 Presentation - CYFR-CAS.ppt
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