A Political Rant

[rebeccaC]

The school can't work on these issues in isolation. It needs to involve other community mental health and social service agencies.

I agree on the power of a community and school working together to expand the possibilities for creating a supportive and healthy learning environment.

I have a good friend teaching in a minority, low-income and high crime community school in Los Angeles. The school has worked hard on building community partnerships through the Los Angeles Education Partnership. The school has programs like parent engagement groups seeking to not only involve parents in the education process but also responding to their fears about their children’s survival in terms of both safety and learning, a program with psychiatric social workers from a community clinic operating an on site clinic, working with both students and community residents and a partnership with the LA Land Trust which built a large community garden for environmental and agriculture learning and for use by students and community residents.

My friend has learned that understanding the shared set of experiences her students have helps greatly in not being trapped in a paradigm about what students cannot do but rather what their personal and cultural strengths allow them to do. The school also uses strategies that plays to strengths yet also encourages weaknesses to become stronger.

My friend and some other teachers started a 9th grade success group that focuses on low performing entering freshmen and a mentoring program that involves juniors and seniors as mentors to the incoming students.
One of the most successful programs the school has implemented is a student run peer mediation group that helps resolve things like racial conflicts to romantic conflicts to family issues. Those student mediators also help train the teachers in understanding their peer problems and mediation.

Of course there are still problems at my friends school but with administrators, teachers, students and the community working together there can be many more moments of success and encouragement for those involved! Hopefully more people can see that possibility of the strength of bringing together school staff, students and community partners to solve problems.

Thanks for the 15 minutes of positive thinking this gave me during my lunch


Edit...Veronica, I talked to my teacher friend tonight about this. Your location says you’re from the San Fran area. She said you may want to look into what the Berkeley Alliance (the city and UC) are doing on equity/minority issues in the communities/schools they are working in.