Building School-Community Partnerships: Collaboration for Student Success - Paperback

by Mavis G. Sanders (Editor)

How can we partner with our communities to improve school programs and increase students′ success?

This current era of high stakes testing, accountability, and shrinking educational budgets demands that schools seek bold and innovative ways to build strong learning environments for all students. Community involvement is a powerful tool in generating resources that are essential for educational excellence.

Building School-Community Partnerships: Collaboration for Student Success emphasizes the importance of community involvement for effective school functioning, student support and well-being, and community health and development. This sharp, insightful book serves as an excellent resource for educators seeking to establish school-community partnerships to achieve goals for their schools and the students, families, and communities they serve. Schools can collaborate with a wide variety of community partners to obtain the resources they need to achieve important goals for students′ learning. Some of these partners may include:

• Businesses and corporations
• Universities and other institutions of higher learning
• National and local volunteer organizations
• Social service agencies and health partners
• Faith-based organizations and institutions

Work successfully with community partners to improve school programs and curricula, strengthen families, and expand your students′ learning experiences!

Author Biography

Mavis G. Sanders is assistant professor of education in the School of Professional Studies in Business and Education, research scientist at the Center for Research on the Education of Students Placed at Risk (CRESPAR), and senior advisor to the National Network of Partnership Schools at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of many articles on the effects of school, fam-ily, and community support on African American adolescents' school suc-cess, the impact of partnership programs on the quality of family and community involvement, and international research on partnerships. She is interested in how schools involve families that are traditionally hard to reach, how schools meet challenges for implementing excellent programs and practices, and how schools define "community" and develop mean-ingful school-family-community connections. Her most recent book is Schooling Students Placed at Risk: Research, Policy, and Practice in the Education of Poor and Minority Adolescents (Lawrence Erlbaum, 2000). She earned her PhD in education from Stanford University.