WORKING TOGETHER
Harnessing Community Resources
to Improve Middle Schools


THREE COMMUNITY COALITIONS

Louisville, Kentucky: Middle School Coalition

Strong links to business and social services


A dynamic partnership involving the school system, business, and social service agencies, Louisville's Middle School Coalition got its start in 1993. In that year, Jefferson County Public Schools approached a group of local social service providers for help in designing a plan to extend the school system's work in middle school reform. Lynn Rippy, director of youth services for the city, volunteered for the team that was writing the proposal. "Many of our high-risk kids were having difficulties in school," she recalls. "I hoped it might be a way to improve the situation for them."

The coalition they proposed has grown into a large and inclusive group, with representatives from the public schools, government and nonprofit social service programs, the courts, unions, professional organizations, small and large businesses, and the larger community. Cindy Read, education program coordinator at United Parcel Service, remembers well her first phone call from the coalition's director, asking her to join: "She didn't have to convince me. Working for children in this age group really struck a chord. Also, UPS sees education as a top priority for the future of our workforce and the quality of life in this community."

Together, members of the coalition strive to enlarge community engagement with the schools while increasing students' academic achievement. For its first two years, the coalition operated through five subcommittees: user-friendly schools, social services, parent empowerment, business in the schools, and media support for schools. It recently reorganized into three committees with broader mandates: community engagement, social services, and evaluation (which monitors the effectiveness of all coalition activities). Business meetings are held every other month, with presentations by experts on youth development or education issues scheduled for the months between.

In Louisville, community engagement has truly been viewed as a two-way street. Coalition members have reached out to businesses, while at the same time encouraging schools to take an honest look at how they handle their own "customer relations" tasks of greeting parents and conveying information to the community. "We all need to set standards for ourselves," says Lynn Rippy, who now chairs the coalition. "Schools need to bring themselves into alignment with the business point of view. Parents are like customers, but with an important difference. Customers can decide not to do business with a particular company. Parents can't just not go to their child's school."

To urge the schools along, the coalition created the NICE program, a voluntary effort through which middle schools can be certified as user-friendly, or "NICE" schools. (The acronym stands for "Neighborly, Inviting Center of Education.") Each NICE school receives a special banner, and the coalition releases news of the award to the press. According to Susan Shortt, a former teacher and the coalition's staff director, "certification is actually less important than the process of looking at the school through the eyes of the community." This year, Superintendent Stephen Daeschner adapted the NICE program for use in elementary and high schools, as well as the district's central offices.

In a related program, the coalition is tapping the customer-relations expertise of UPS to provide special training for school secretaries--every school's front line in relations with the community. Last summer, UPS invited secretaries from each middle school to attend a version of its phone courtesy training, customized to cover the particular and sometimes delicate situations that arise in the daily life of a school. "The feedback from secretaries was tremendous," recalls Read. "The training gave them new skills and a sense that what they do is seen as important." Since then, UPS has trained another round of secretaries and may maintain the program on an ongoing basis.

UPS has a strong stake in Louisville, where 14,000 employees operate the company's national air hub. Read was hired in 1993, after the company decided to dedicate two staff positions to helping implement the new Kentucky Education Reform Act (KERA). She had worked before that for a small foundation with an interest in fostering business partnerships in education. "We talked a lot then about the need to get involved in systemwide reform," she remembers, "and I bought into that. What I've learned since is that nothing happens if you're not in the classroom. Otherwise, it's just policy and theory. You need a broad vision, of course, but that has to be supported with day-to-day, get-involved, know-people kind of stuff."

Thus, beyond its contribution to the NICE schools project, UPS is also engaged in a close partnership with Williams Middle School. The school and company together won a U.S. Department of Education grant for a school-to-work program that now brings kids into UPS facilities for extended, challenging job-related experiences. One group of students worked with a UPS team on planning the load for an international flight--a process that engaged students' math and logic skills as they decided how to organize the sequence of steps for loading the freight while balancing its weight and volume. Another worked with the information services division, receiving a short version of the company's regular desktop publishing training, preparing overheads, and getting tips from the UPS public speaking trainer.

Connecting teachers with the tasks and challenges of real workplaces is the goal of another coalition-sponsored program. "We kept asking teachers to use real-life situations in their classrooms," says Susan Shortt, "but most teachers have been working at their own jobs for so long that they've lost touch with other places." To help develop job-related curriculum, Shortt asked teachers to let her know what kinds of jobs they'd be interested in learning more about, then found people who agreed to be shadowed by a teacher for a day during the summer. Through the coalition's network, Shortt found volunteers in a range of professions--chemists, doctors, judges, government officials, bankers, newspaper editors and reporters, architects--and matched them with educators from the city's middle schools.

The coalition also helped establish a relationship between Ford Motor Company and Westport Middle School. Carl Dowell, president of the United Auto Workers local and a member of the coalition, sees the program as an important investment in Louisville's workforce and his own union's future members. "When students come here and really see what we do, they understand what it takes to get and hold a job at a place like Ford," he says. "It's important for them to get an idea of what they're working toward--whether it's an industrial job, a job in a service industry, or something else."

On the social services side, the coalition's contribution has been equally impressive. Most significant has been the group's ability to develop a single referral form for communication between the school system and local social service agencies and the family court. School personnel report all problems--attendance, truancy, parental neglect, and others--on this form, which is routed automatically to the appropriate agencies. Further, each request for services must be dealt with in a timely way, and the school receives a reply within a specified period. Most important, children are getting services faster.

As its next challenge, the coalition is planning a public awareness campaign to publicize standards-based reform. Louisville is committed to raising achievement through academic standards, and the time has come for the public to understand the changes now sweeping the city's school system. Sandra Ledford, who holds the post of middle school advocate in the school district, sees the coalition as a valuable "conduit" between the community and the school district. "Not only do coalition members talk about standards within their own organizations," she says, "but they help us reach the general public. Here's one example: the coalition printed messages about middle school reform on grocery bags. When people see that, they know something important is going on."

In addition to planning a conference for parents that will address standards, the coalition has asked middle school principals to join a speakers' bureau and is lining up engagements with civic and community groups, churches, reporters, and others. They are also supporting a special "Make the Connection" project, which will connect every seventh grader with an adult from the community. Meanwhile, the mayor has agreed to record a series of public service announcements for the radio.

Hopes are high for the campaign, although the coalition's success in attracting media attention has been disappointing in the past. When the first NICE school was certified, for example, the award ceremony got no television coverage. One coalition member jokes: "Maybe we should call the television station and say we've found a gun on one of the kids. Then, when the cameras arrive, we can tell them about the NICE program." Members of the coalition also suffered a crisis of confidence when Kentucky released its first set of test scores since the reform act, and Louisville middle schools did poorly. Lynn Rippy remembers asking herself, "Are there too many things coming at the schools at once?" After that initial reaction, though, she came to a different conclusion: "What the scores really show is how important it is for us to stay focused."

Indeed, many in the coalition and the school system have been impressed and inspired to see how deeply Louisville's residents seem to care about middle school children and their educational success. "So many people take the attitude that it's their business to learn more," says Shortt. "The coalition hasn't by coincidence found the only 40 or 50 people who really care. There are a lot of people who care." About the coalition itself and its three years of hard work, Lynn Rippy reflects: "It's a surprise, I guess, that so many people have hung on. We're gaining trust, we're working together. People have laid things on the table, and that's important for lasting change."


Next section of Working Together


Return to the Working Together contents page


from WORKING TOGETHER: Harnessing Community Resources to Improve Middle Schools. By Anne Mackinnon. Published in 1997 by the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation.