School-community partnership models: implications for leadership

Abstract

School–community partnerships have shown promise as an educational reform effort. In these partnerships, schools expand their traditional educational mission to include health and social services for children and families and to involve the broader community. Such partnerships have been found to enhance student learning, strengthen schools and support struggling neighbourhoods. Little is known, however, about the implications for school and community leadership in different types of partnerships. A previous review of the literature indicated four basic types of partnership, each with a different scope and purpose and different implications for leadership. Informed by interagency, leadership and social capital theories, this article describes the leadership practices that support each model and the dilemmas these partnership leaders face. The overall goal of the article is to deepen understanding of leadership in these models in order to strengthen the conditions for school–community partnership success.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Classification decisions were based on the written accounts of the partnerships at a particular point in time. Because written materials are produced for a variety of reasons, they might omit information that would have resulted in a different classification. In addition, national organizations such as Communities in Schools (CIS) can include 100s of affiliate members that, collectively, are likely to fall into more than one category and to change over time. For these reasons, and as shown in Table 1, we picture blurred, rather than fixed, lines between the partnership categories.

2. See Fuller et al. (2013) for a noteworthy exception.