The Federation For Community Schools - An Illinois Collaboration Striving to Link Schools to Communities

Creating Linkages between Early Childhood and Community Schools

On December 7, 2011 the Federation for Community Schools hosted a conversation around linkages between community schools and early childhood, and opportunities for community schools to support positive kindergarten transitions and access to strong early learning opportunities. The dialogue was anchored by a presentation from Marty Blank and Reuben Jacobson from the Institute for Educational Leadership and the Coalition for Community Schools. They shared work underway in several communities across the country to link community schools and early childhood, including Tulsa, OK, Multnomah, OR, Cincinnati, and Evansville, IN. Initial learnings from this work demonstrate that it’s critical for principals to prioritize creating linkages between their schools and the institutions that their students come from and will transition to. Community school stakeholders have an opportunity to educate leadership and other stakeholders, in turn, about the importance of early childhood learning, and of the ways that they can all support strong transitions to kindergarten.

The meeting also included group discussion about experiences attendees had in connecting to early childhood and linkages to kindergarten. Participants raised the point that high-quality early learning centers often stress a high degree of family engagement. There is an opportunity for schools to build off of that “history of engagement” when children enter kindergarten, but often schools miss the opportunity to do so. Marty, Reuben, and meeting participants all highlighted the fact that creating these linkages cannot fall to the resource coordinator alone, but that it needs to be a function of other stakeholders within the community school, such as the advisory board. The group offered creative ways to make these connections – from working through the advisory board to establishing summer orientation programs for rising kindergarteners, creating teacher connections, and sharing information and practices. Attendees also suggested supporting the transition into kindergarten by bringing kindergarten teachers over to early learning centers to meet children and families and bringing children and parents from an early learning center to schools to “orient” them to kindergarten.

Thanks to everyone who attended the 7th Annual Illinois Community Schools Forum on October 28th!

Thanks to everyone who joined us at the 7th Annual Illinois Community Schools Forum on October 28! We are truly inspired by your commitment to this work. The day was enriched by the contributions made by everyone who attended - from presenters to attendees, from Resource Coordinators to funders, and from principals to partner agency representatives.

Please tell us about your experience! Every year we use all of the feedback you provide us with to inform the planning process for the next year's Forum. With each year, we strive to offer a bigger and better Community Schools Forum for those engaged in community school work at all levels. But we can only do it with your help.

If you did not get a chance to fill-out a Forum survey at the event, please take a few minutes to complete the Forum Survey.

Workshop materials are now available! The handouts and presentation materials provided at the Illinois Community Schools Forum are now available for download from the Forum Materials section of our website.

A New State School Report Card for Illinois – What it is, how you can use it
As part of Illinois’ P-20 Council work, for the past nine months a group of educators, children’s advocates, education policy experts, administrators, and parents have come together to review and redesign the state school report card. The goal of the committee’s work was to develop a tool that provides parents and other stakeholders in children’s educations with information they can use to make choices about their children’s educations, support the development of strong schools across the state, and understand the strengths – and areas for growth – of all of our schools. The committee, which included a Federation representative, conducted focus groups with key stakeholders, including parents, to gather their input on the components and the design of the new report card.

A bill (HR 605) passed during the recent veto session in Springfield that enacts the new version of the state school report card. The new report card includes information about student and school progress towards academic goals, comparisons to “like” schools, information about community partnerships and engagement, outcomes of school climate surveys (coming soon), and other, more meaningful metrics than the previous version. In addition, the new version is much more “user-friendly,” with clear definitions of different categories of information and context for the meaning of certain metrics.