The focus in this chapter thus far has been primarily on the relationship between families and schools, and its importance in producing school outcomes. We now broaden our discussion to include a more extensive set of interactions that involve parents’ collective activities, as well as those of people who do not have children or whose children are not of school age. These people, living and working close to schools, are often referred to as the “community,” although, as will be noted shortly, a strong sense of community in public school neighbourhoods is a relatively rare occurrence today.

Coleman and Hoffer (1987), in their study of public and private schools in the United States, found that the community surrounding Catholic private schools constituted a very significant educational resource. These communities, with their social networks and common norms of behaviour, supported individual parents both in their interactions with schools and with the supervision of their children’s behaviour. Referring to this as social capital, Coleman and Hoffer note,

The feedback that a parent receives from friends and associates, either unsolicited or in response to questions, provides extensive additional resources that aid parents in monitoring the school and the child, and the norms that parents, as part of their everyday activity, are able to establish act as important aids in socializing children. (p. 7)

Similar situations exist within the Canadian public school system, although they tend to be relatively uncommon.

In most public schools, students are drawn from a geographically defined catchment area rather than from a true community in the sense described above. Rather than being supported by a closely knit social group that holds a common set of values and expectations, the public school has become a meeting place for a wide range of interests and loosely structured communities. Within such settings, students develop a peer culture that may work either in harmony or in opposition to the educational goals of the professional staff. In some schools, virtually all of a student’s relationships outside of the family are with other students in the school, while in other schools, students may have a much wider set of relationships. Likewise, the norms of the student culture may be in harmony with those of the school or may serve to undermine them.

Community Education and Community Schools

Calls for community schools that are more responsive to their communities come from many quarters and are driven by many different visions and expectations for schools, their clientele, curriculum, and governance and use a variety of different terminology including “community schools”, “full-service schools”, “hub schools”, and “wraparound schools” (Clanfield & Martell, 2010; Thompson, 2008; Tymchuk, 2001). As indicated in Box 8.7.1, the notion of a community school extends beyond simply shared facilities or coordinated service delivery to focus on “two-way community hubs” (Clandfield, 2010, p. 20) that link enhanced learning in school to local community development.

Thompson (2008) makes the distinction between community education as a philosophy based on community involvement and lifelong learning that expands the traditional role of the school and creates a mutually interdependent relationship among home, school, and community (p. 6) and community schools as the delivery system for achieving this philosophy. To this end, the school’s clientele may be expanded from the traditional school-aged cohort to include all ages, from prenatal and early childhood to adults, with the traditional school year replaced by a year-round program. In some jurisdictions, the community school has been able to provide, by means of collaboration between social services—social workers, guidance counsellors, health-care workers, teachers, and so on—multiple services that are essential in meeting the individual needs of all students in the school. An extension of this approach to community schooling is the recognition that in some—perhaps many—situations, schools may not be the best places for students to learn; the community itself may be the best classroom of all.

Perhaps the most comprehensive effort to develop schools as the centre of the community and as the hub of services and supports for the neighbourhood that it serves occurred in Saskatchewan in the early 2000s. From 1999-2001, a Task Force on the Role of the School, chaired by Dr. Michael Tymchak undertook a public dialogue across Saskatchewan that focused on the changing role of schools. The Task force recommended a creative new vision for schools called School PLUS that would see all schools in the province located within a nexus of governmental, third party, and community-based human service organizations. For a short period of time School PLUS was the centerpiece for educational innovation. More recently it has lost some of its prominence in the province even though the ideas of School PLUS still influence the design and delivery of educational services. The Tymchuk report remains an important articulation of a community school model and below in Box 8.7.2 are some excerpts from the Task Force report.

Today in Canada a number of provinces, including Manitoba, British Columbia, and New Brunswick have Community Schools Programs but generally these have taken on a narrower agenda as initiatives providing additional resources to specific high need communities to implement community-based supports for students.