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y J'

The Bloomsbury Handbook of

Rural Education in the United States
Edited by
Amy Price Azano, Karen Eppley, and
Catharine Biddle

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 12

Rural School-Community Partnerships

Creating Community-Aware Educational Practices

Hope G. Casto and John W. Sipple

Rural school-community partnerships have the potential to create "community-aware"

educational practices (Casto, Sipple et al., 2016). By this we mean that for schools to truly serve
children, their families, and the broader community, a deeper and thicker conception of need
must be addressed and measured before and after new policies, programs, and partnerships
are enacted. Too often, education policies are designed and implemented with concern solely
focused on students inside the four walls of the school ( e.g., math scores, overrepresentation in
special education, free lunch counts, homework help). Policies are designed and implemented
without attention to the needs and impacts of the community in which children and families
live. Understanding and meeting the thicker needs such as lack of economic opportunity, poor
nutrition, poor health, family stress, and obstacles to family stability requires a different policy
approach from the more instrumental practice of meeting the immediate challenges faced by
students in school. In the midst of understanding these thicker needs, it is still essential to attend to
the very real needs of children in day-to-day school practices. It is our contention that educational
policy, as well as school partnerships and practice, can help to better understand thicker needs of
children and communities including racial and economic equity, social exclusion, and historical
wedges that divide communities and schools.

Rural School-Community Partnerships

School-community partnerships can be understood as any formalized arrangement between
organizations or individuals in a community and the school or individuals within the school.
Partnering can be seen in a variety of efforts, including coordinated services (Crowson & Boyd,
1993), full-service schools (Cummings et al., 2011; Dryfoos, 1994), community schools (Dryfoos
& Maguire, 2002; Ferrara & Jacobson, 2019), in addition to partnerships with local businesses,
nonprofit entities, community groups, churches, and individuals (Casto, 2016; Furco, 2013;
Sanders, 2001, 2003; Shirley, 2001). Understanding and assessing the role of the community within
 The Bloomsbury Handbook of Rural Education in the United States

these relationships requires defining community in the context of partnerships. The most local
geographic community (i.e., village, neighborhood) may be most salient for parents or families,
while an institutional definition of community (i.e., school district) may be more influential for
educators and school leaders (Casto, 2019). However, geographical definitions (such as villages
or neighborhoods) of community have been critiqued as colorblind leading to a need to attend
to sociocultural definitions of community (LeChasseur, 2014). School and community leaders
should work together, in collaboration with appropriate stakeholders, to ensure a meaningful
definition of community is employed in partnering efforts.
Historically, rural schools have been understood on one hand as central to rural places
(Hanifan, 1920; Peshkin, 1978) and on the other as inefficient institutions that limit progress
(often as measured by an urban standard) in rural places (Schafft & Jackson, 2010a; Tyack.
1974). Nonetheless, rural schools are central and crucial to rural communities in a variety of
ways (Lyson, 2002; Schafft & Jackson, 2010a; Sipple, Francis et al., 2019; Tieken, 2014). Rural
school-community partnering is unique, given potential challenges of geographic isolation
(Casto, 2016), population sparsity, and the associated "diffusion of human capacity" (Minner &
Hiles, 2005, p. 85) due to the physical distance between people, settlements, schools, and potential
partners. Successful rural schools engage families and communities in their work (Barley &
Beesley, 2007), and partnering in rural places requires leaders focused on family and community
involvement (Bauch, 200 I; Casto, 20 I 6; Krumm & Curry, 20 I 7; Schafft et al., 2006).
Partnering takes a variety of forms and serves a range of purposes and goals. Some school-
community partnerships focus less on the academic achievement of students and more on school
reform, the support of families, community development efforts, and developing a sense of place
(Casto, 2016). With this attention beyond the walls of the schools, partnering activities of schools
serve as an excellent place to begin to draw attention to a community-aware perspective for
school and community leaders. Complementing this understanding of partnering and drawing
attention beyond the walls of the school, Bauch (2001) identifies six types of family-school-
community connections: social capital, sense of place, parent involvement, church ties, school-
business-agency relationships, and the community as a curricular resource. Types, forms, and
goals of partnerships vary from place to place and are dependent on context; regardless, they
provide an opportunity for schools and communities to work in collaboration and for mutual
benefit.
While all forms of rural school-community partnering can be approached with a community-
aware perspective, it is arguably the partnerships aligned with community development efforts
that are most easily viewed from this perspective. School and community leaders in partnerships
work together for benefits mutually experienced by the school and its community. For example.
Schafft and colleagues (2006) describe a school and community working together to develop the
technology infrastructure necessary for teaching and learning but also accessible to members of
the whole community. Harmon and Schafft (2009) identify how school leaders can best align
community development efforts with their professional educational administrative role, with an
understanding that student achievement and community vitality are "inextricably connected" (p.
8). This view of community and school as intertwined and interdependent is foundational for
school leaders intending to adopt a community-aware perspective in their leadership.
Partnering must take into account access and inclusion through both historical and current
understandings of who has been present in a community and how power has been distributed

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 Rural School-Community Partnerships

among community members. Given the symbiotic nature of the school and community
relationship, "if social injustice and inequity plague the social fabric of a community, these social
issues will affect student learning within neighborhood schools" (O'Connor & Daniello, 2019, p.
312). Models of family engagement as important components of partnerships ought to account for
parents' prior educational experiences, as well as differing cultural practices and understandings of
schooling. Additionally, the role of educators requires listening to varied voices in the community
and interventions in the school to ensure and enhance cultural competencies (Yull et al., 2014).
This challenge to develop inclusive partnering practices is an echo of Dewey's insistence that "only
by being true to the full growth of all the individuals who make it up, can society by any chance
be true to itself" (Boydston, 1976, p. 5). The interdependence of schools and their communities
creates the need for a community-aware perspective for educational policy and practice.

Community-Aware Perspective
Within a community-aware orientation, education policy and practice are connected to
community vitality and development (Casto, Sipple et al., 2016). This perspective is rooted in an
understanding of human need as thick rather than thin (Dean, 20 10). In other words, human needs
are relational and holistic rather than individualistic and narrow. While providing free lunch to
children from families living near the poverty line is essential and works toward meeting some of
the immediate needs of the family, it would be exponentially more beneficial to that child, their
family, and the entire community to attend to the roots of poverty and hunger. The immediate and
the systemic need to be addressed simultaneously. Food insecurity still exists even as broader and
systemic efforts are undertaken.
This community-aware perspective is a broad orientation encompassing cross-sector policies
and practices, including school-community partnering. When a community-aware perspective is
adopted by policymakers, the resultant policies have the power to reduce unintended deleterious
effects on communities due to the avoidance of narrowly defined or siloed polices focusing only
on a single sector, such as education. As illustrated in the next section of this chapter, Universal
Pre-kindergarten (UPK) in New York State (NYS) offers an example of a narrowly defined
education policy with an unintended consequence that created potential deleterious effects
on communities. This particular policy requires schools to partner with a community-based
organization (CBO) to provide some or all of the prekindergarten programming for children in
the district. On the surface one could view this as a community-aware policy that appeared to
be taking into account the existing early care and education sector; however, without guidance
for school and community leaders these partnerships (or waivers offered to schools to avoid the
required partnering) were often taken on without careful planning and without a community-
aware orientation. In this case, some communities that implemented UPK actually experienced
decreased availability of infant and toddler care (Sipple et al., 2020). The type of community-
aware policy implementation required to ensure UPK did not negatively impact the rest of the
early childcare and education sector is unfamiliar to many school leaders. Lacking guidance to
support careful planning by school and community leaders, childcare providers were negatively
impacted by the implementation of UPK, especially in rural areas. The narrow goal of providing
schooling for four-year-olds did not take into account a more interdependent view of the care
options needed by families who have infants and toddlers in addition to four-year-olds.

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 The Bloomsbury Handbook of Rural Education in the United States

A community-aware perspective is focused on the full realization of individuals' need

for the good of the community with a thick view of individual and community need. This
perspective unites the need for inclusive partnering as well as community dcvelopment-orienkd
partnering. Local practice is influenced by local priorities and relationships but also shaped and
constrained by nonlocal policy (Arum, 2000; Casto & Sipple, 2011). Arum (2000) argues that the
modernization and professionalization of education has led to school leaders being increasingly
beholden to the broader state and national influences, to the exclusion of the influences of the
local, ecological community. Rural leaders are motivated by local influences (Casto & Sipple.
201l) and for isolated rural schools in particular, there may be a mediating layer that is both local
and institutional: the school district (Casto, 20 1 9). Policy design and implementation arc equally
critical as local practice in the application and use of the community-aware perspective. Here, we
share three examples of community-aware practice, in order to engage the reader in questions of
how state or federal policy might inhibit or promote such practice.

Illustrations of Community-Aware Partnering

Illustrations from schools and communities will help to provide both examples of how this
perspective can be practiced as well as inspiration to understand its need. In the rural communities
in which we have worked, there are often few, if any, community organizations with which a
school could partner. As was the case in the New York example, small and isolated rural places
are often fragile ecosystems that can easily be disturbed by missteps that can occur with even the-
best intentions.

The Early Childcare and Education Ecosystem

As UPK was rolled out in NYS, rural school districts were slow to accept the state grant and
implement the program. Asked by the state to better understand this slow take-up rate, we cngagc'cl
in a series of case studies in various rural regions of the state. In one community, we found a deep
commitment to early education shared across the school board, teachers, and administrators.
This district had been an early adopter of Targeted Pre-kindergarten (a prekindergarten progran
in NYS prior to UPK that was targeted at children from low-income families) and had wha
we referred to as an institutionalized PK-12 vision of schooling, rather than only K-12 (Casto
& Sipple, 2011). And yet, wc heard dire stories from the one local childcare center. They were
suffering financially and feared having to close their doors. This would have left the community
with no options for a licensed care provider for infants and toddlers. We were left with numerous
questions about what had happened (or not happened, as we would come to find out) in this
district during the UPK implementation process.
When NYS initiated the UPK grant opportunity, districts were required to partner with a local
CBO. Per the policy, at least IO percent of the grant funding must be subcontracted with a local
organization to provide early childhood education. This community sought to embark on the
implementation without consulting with the single local CBO with whom they could have partnered.
According to the director of the CBO, the childcare center experienced significant financial stress
as a result of families' new access to free UPK for their four-year-olds. Financially, four-year-olds
were vital to the budgetary health of the center. We came to understand later that childcare centers
often balance their budget on the tuition dollars from older children who require less intensive

140
 Rural School--Community Partnerships

supervision and care, as evidenced in the ratios of teachers to children required, than infants and
toddlers. Meanwhile, the elementary principal believed the school would take on the four-year-olds
and the CBO could focus on the infants to three-year-olds and the county would be "rocking" early
childhood education. In fact, when the school took on the four-year-olds, the CBO lost tuition-paying
families and struggled to recoup these costs from families with younger children. In retrospect, the
principal reflected: "I should have talked to people." And it is with this example that we can describe
the state's UPK policy's requirement for partnering as suggestive ofa community-aware perspective;
however, without the technical assistance of how community and school leaders could engage in the
planning and implementation process a truly community-aware outcome cannot be realized.

Windmills and Budget Restoration

A distinctly rural community faced typical challenges of loss of local employment, population
loss, and heightened property taxes for those left behind. In the early 2000s, the school district
began laying off staff in an effort to balance its very slow growth in local tax revenues with
increasing retirement, energy, and healthcare costs. Embedded in this community is the K-12
school building that educated generations of students-some of whom returned to become
teachers and administrators. A favorite local saying was that the community grew cows, trees,
and children and exported cheese, paper, and graduates. As the superintendent and school board
laid off staff, the superintendent got school board approval to collaborate with leaders from four
towns in the area along with their county officials, on an ill-defined and poorly understood idea
of building an industrial wind farm.
A wind farm of this magnitude was a first in the state. The infrastructure, laws, tax policy, and
land use were all unknowns for these municipal leaders and one school superintendent. Over the
next three years, the superintendent engaged in countless meetings with scientists, politicians,
business leaders, tax attorneys, and citizens. Eventually, a set of agreements were signed between
the international firm building the wind farm, the municipal governments, the local energy utility,
and, importantly, the school district. Individual landowners, who agreed to allow a 400-foot-tall
wind turbine on their property, would eventually receive annual checks and municipalities and
the school district would enter into payment-in-lieu-of taxes (PILOT) agreements in which they
would receive payments rather than subjecting the wind farm to property taxes.
Fast forward to 2005, the school district received its first PILOT check and then 2006, the
wind farm first came online. After four years of near-level funding of teacher salaries (2001- 4),
which had resulted in the cutting of nearly twenty teaching positions, we see an increase in
annual expenditures on teacher salaries of $2 million--from 2005-6 ($5.29 million) to 20 10-11
(S7.28 million). This resulted in the rehiring of all teachers previously laid off. Additionally,
after relatively stagnant property tax values per pupil from 1996 ($116,374) to 2004 ($ I 35,123),
the property values per pupil jumped in 2005 (to $155,112) and then nearly doubled to over
$280,000 per pupil by 2011 and later. This increase was due to the combination of new annual
PILOT receipts, enhanced property values across the community, and at least some homeowners
receiving $10,000 checks each year to allow a turbine on their property.
This example illustrates that the involvement of a superintendent in nonschool economic
development activity can pay great dividends. Had the board insisted the superintendent spend all
his time on school-related issues, it is likely the district would have continued to lay off teachers,
lose enrollment, and spiral into economic and educational decline (Figure 12.1 ).

141
 The Bloomsbury Handbook of Rural Education in the United States

District Trends 1996--2016

$90,00,000 $3,50,000
$80,00,000 - $3,00,000
$70,00,000 ---
$2,50,000
$60,00,000 Z
$50,00,000 Z
' $2,00,000
$40,00,000 ______ _,,,,,,. >---- $1,50,000
$30,00,000 ------ $ I ,00,000
$20,00,000
$50,000
$10,00,000
$- --------------------- $-
+ > to bO a > to to to b> b> o a ho > > o bO
o o oooooooooooooooo o
93888£88£888585 u»+oo
-- Teacher Salary Expenditures - - Property Wealth per Pupil

Figure 12.1 Financial trends in district affected by wind farm development, 1996-2016.

Healthy Kids I/ave Better Opportunities

We now offer an example of an outreach and research program that aims to better understand
and assist one rural community facing economic downturns through a unique partnership.
Additionally, we share research on a broader set of partnerships across a five-county region that
includes twenty-one school-based health centers (SBHC) run by a single hospital. The case links
a highly energetic and visionary superintendent, a dedicated and idealistic pediatrician, and a
database of 3.5 million patient records across five counties. Together, we have embarked on a
comprehensive effort to enhance the health and well-being of children to allow the school and
healthcare providers to better serve their communities. To do this work, we initially responded to
an invitation from the pediatrician. He explained that while his SBHCs are successful in caring for
the acute and developmental health needs of children, the communities from which the children
come are increasingly impacted by economic challenges and by the effects of drug addiction, in
particular opioids, which can lead to particularly stressful environments for children. Our prior
work with the superintendent allowed us insight into one of the eighteen partnerships. Here we
use a community-aware perspective to enable our understanding of the data we collected.
Our example begins with a single rural PK-12 school building that is located equidistant from
two small villages. Responding to the various pressures to modernize, gain efficiency, enhance
academic and extracurricular programs, as well as to benefit from state incentives to consolidate
school districts, the communities merged twenty years ago to build a modern K-12 school in
an isolated location between the two villages. However, the consolidation of two small schools
into one larger school did not stem the loss of population or employment decline in the area.
Accordingly, the needs of families in this rural area are great.
This school district is one of eighteen in the region that benefits from a distinct and formal
relationship with a large, rural hospital system. This hospital system "sponsors" SBHCs in twenty-
one school buildings across eighteen school districts. The key to this network is the organization
and financial support of the hospital along with the expertise and leadership of a pediatrician
and a nurse who make it work. Each SBHC is staffed by a range of healthcare professionals
who provide administration, health insurance accounting, and direct provision of health care,

142
 Rural School--Community Partnerships

including somatic, dental, mental, and reproductive health care. The coordination of care and
administration across the twenty-one clinics is carried out by the nurse and two pediatricians.
However, to truly have an impact on the whole child and family, the relationship and cooperation
between the school and SBHC is critical. The school leaders and healthcare providers have a
common goal of reducing the impact of poverty and to elevate well-being and opportunity in
their respective communities and the broader region. In one of the eighteen districts with which
we are most familiar, the superintendent and his staff do this through enhanced family supports
and education and the pediatrician provides quality primary and holistic care in the school
setting. While these relationships vary across their twenty-one sites, the relationship between
this particular superintendent and pediatrician is particularly good and fruitful. Capitalizing on
this strong dynamic between educational and healthcare leadership, we secured a small grant to
hire a local person to act as a liaison between parents, educators, and the healthcare officials. Our
hypothesis was that families that struggled to have a productive relationship with the educators
were similar if not the same as those who faced communication and follow-up issues with the
healthcare providers in the school-based clinic. This liaison worked to break down barriers,
enhance understanding and connectivity, and generally work to enhance the positive impacts
of schooling and health care for families. This particular set of relationships is emblematic of
the power of a community-aware perspective in action. With this thick understanding of need,
students' academic and health needs are simultaneously met.
We have now initiated an engaged research program to measure the impact of SBHCs on
children and communities. The data with which we can understand the impact of SBHCs on
communities includes 3.5 million cases over seven years. We link the health data (individuals
ages 0--100+) with school district data (community measures) to allow for measurement of the
relationships between demographics, fiscal well-being, and the presence or absence of a SBHC.
Exploring the mathematical estimates of relationships would fail to provide the kind of robust
analysis we seek, but with the enhanced understandings of the nuance and complexities of school-
community relationships we can offer enhanced understanding.
Linking health care with educational organizations can be useful and allow for enhanced
healthcare access. However, linking healthcare and educational leaders who are both focused on
moving beyond student attendance, traditional forms of student achievement, and acute health to
broader indicators and practices of family and community well-being is critical. This community-
aware scope and perspective create an opportunity for studying and understanding the multitude
of ways in which schools and hospitals can partner to enhance community well-being.

Conclusion
Rural communities can be especially fragile communities in the sense that a network of
educational organizations and CBOs may be quite limited and unable to fully meet the needs of
the community. In addition, rural residents are more likely to face unemployment. Recovery from
the 2008 recession has been slower in some places (USDA, 2018). Children and families in rural
areas face health disparities making them more likely to suffer from a range of illnesses, as well as
injuries, due not only to lifestyle differences but also isolation and reduced access to health care
(CDC, 2017). Rural communities also face higher rates of opioid addiction and overdose than other
geographic regions (USDA, n.d.). In addition, as highlighted in this chapter, rural communities

143
 The Bloomsbury Handbook of Rural Education in the United States

also have particular relationships with their local schools. School-community partnering stands
to have a compounded impact in small, isolated, and fragile rural ecologies. This impact can be
deleterious if not approached carefully. It is communities with school and community leaders
who utilize community-aware perspectives that this impact can be compounded in positive ways.
Community-aware policies and partnerships can enhance the resources and opportunities made
available to rural schools, communities, as well as families and children. Rural school leaders
not only need the time and space to pursue community-aware projects, as seen in the wind farm
example, but school boards can seek to hire rural superintendents with these competencies in
mind. And in order to create a pipeline of these community-aware leaders, educational leadership
programs can prepare leaders who know and understand the ecology of communities. With a
community-aware perspective all sectors in rural communities are enhanced and rural families
and communities are able to thrive in mutually beneficial ways.
In this chapter we have focused on rural school-community partnering that is largely focused
on community development (windfarm) or the support of children and families (UPK and
SBHCs). The three illustrations speak to these types of partnerships; however, the community-
aware perspective can also be brought to partnerships with a curricular focus, as well, through
place-based pedagogies. Place-based pedagogy can be a more palatable form of partnership for
some educators because the goal is aligned with the core purpose of schooling: the education of
students (Casto, 2016). Place-based pedagogies, however, would be enhanced by a community-
aware perspective. The inherent community development and inclusive components of
community-aware perspectives would call on place-based pedagogies to reckon with past and
present exclusion or differential impact in the community. For example, place-based educational
experiences would not only explore the local environment or politics but also environmental
racism, political exclusion, and other historical inequities endemic to a particular place. Rural
school-community partnering can be especially meaningful for children and families in small
and isolated places and a community-aware perspective has the potential to enhance all forms of
partnering.

144
 13

Collective Impact in Rural Places

Sarah J. Zuckerman

Complex social problems such as teen pregnancy, youth suicide, student achievement, and foster
care placement result from the interplay of problems in both the public and private sectors.
Isolated approaches by single organizations in individual sectors, in general, have failed to "move
the needle" on many of these problems. Such "wicked" problems are defined by complexity,
interrelatedness, unpredictability, open-ended, intractable, and often subjected to competing
values (Head & Alford, 2015). As such, wicked problems do not respond to technical, ready-
made solutions. Instead, they require adaptive and iterative approaches to learning about the
causes of complex challenges, generating solutions, measuring the impact, and using knowledge
generated to revise solutions (Edmondson & Zimpher, 2014; Kania & Kramer, 2011). Rural
communities are not immune from such problems. For example, research suggests rural youth
are more likely to die by suicide than their urban peers (Fontanella et al., 2015; Singh et al., 2013)
and young women aged fifteen to twenty-four in rural places are more likely than their urban
peers to experience unplanned pregnancies (Sutton et al., 2019).
Place-based, cross-sector partnerships have increasingly been seen as a strategy for tackling
these types of complex social problems by bringing together local assets and drawing on strengths
such as local knowledge, local leadership, and social networks to support children and families
(Boyd et al., 2008; Henig et al., 2016; Kerr et al., 2014). By identifying local challenges and
focusing on local assets, these partnerships seek to avoid the short-termism of shifting national
priorities and policy churn, as well as policy solutions crafted by "distant experts" (Jennings,
1999; Kerr et al., 20 I 4; Stone et al., 200 I). For place-based cross-sector partnerships to be
effective, they must be "flt for purpose, in this place, at this time" (Lawson, 201 3, p. 614,
emphasis original). They must also be "locally developed interventions that engage with an
ecological understanding of place" (Kerr et al., 2014, p. 131). This ecological understanding of
place includes local demographics, organizational environments, and social geography (Lawson
et al., 2014). When partnerships fulfill these recommendations, they have the potential to be
asset- and place-based interventions for complex social challenges.