Educational Leadership

young people, families, and the broader community (Coalition for Community Schools, 2000; Johanek & Puckett, 2007). Typically, community schools work with a coordinator to ensure that all students have health, dental, and mental-health services. Participants in the effort include community activists; businesspeople; professionals (social workers, nurses, physicians, and so on); and college students and faculty.

Public schools are particularly well suited to function as neighborhood centers, or hubs, around which to generate local partnerships. When they play that innovative role, schools function as community institutions par excellence, providing a decentralized, democratic, community-based response to rapidly changing community problems (Benson, Harkavy, & Puckett, 2007).

Bringing the Two
Partners Together

For the last 15 years, we at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) have been working to develop democratic, respectful, mutually beneficial partnerships with our neighboring West Philadelphia schools and communities. The Netter Center for Community Partnerships, working with Penn faculty, pursues this goal through the development of university-assisted community schools.

The university-assisted community school model extends and updates John Dewey’s theory that to function as a genuine community center, the neighborhood school requires additional human resources and support. Universities constitute a strategic source of the broad-based, comprehensive, sustained support that community schools need (Benson, Harkavy, & Puckett, 2007).

Penn’s university-assisted com-
munity schools help educate, engage,
empower, and serve all members of
the community. A broad range of uni-
versity resources support these schools,
including site-based coordinators who
are on the staff of the Netter Center.
In 2009–10, approximately 2,000
Penn students worked in eight West
Philadelphia community schools—445
student interns, work-study students,
and student volunteers, plus 1,575
undergraduate and graduate university
students who took academically based
community service courses that link
service in the community to teaching,
learning, and research. Some of the
academic supports the Netter Center
provides include
n Academic enrichment programs,
including programs in the STEM
disciplines (Science, Technology,
Engineering, and Math). Penn under-
graduate students—supervised by
two professional STEM educators—
and Penn students enrolled in one
of our 12 STEM-based community
service courses, provide hands-on
and inquiry-based learning in the
classroom. These programs fill a
pressing need in West Philadelphia
schools, where learning is predomi-
nately from the textbook and science
labs are mostly nonexistent.

arts instruction.
n Youth development programs that
engage students as community problem
solvers in such areas as health and
nutrition.
n College access and career
development programs. For example,
more than 125 high school students
are offered paid internships on the uni-
versity campus, in Penn’s hospitals, and
in local businesses.
n Six weeks of summer programming
for more than 600 K– 12 students.

The university partnership also seeks to meet the needs of students’ families.

photo by Jamie tomczuk

Netter Center staff members hold monthly parent meetings at school sites to share information about students’ progress and provide guest speakers on such topics as parenting skills and homework. School site coordinators support various other school efforts to engage parents; for example, a recently opened parent resource center at one high school offers a variety of programs in such areas as health and fitness, financial literacy, healthy cooking, and community service.