Schott Foundation Releases New Report, “Keeping Students First: Building Community Labor Partnerships for Strong Schools.”
This report is designed to support community and labor groups that are ready and willing to engage in meaningful relationship building and collaboration. The case examples of union/ community collaboration in St. Paul and Austin highlight two state capitals with distinctly different labor climates and educational challenges. Nonetheless, both unions succeeded by bringing the community into strategy development and partnership in a meaningful way.
This report also contains two ample exercises designed to support labor and community groups beginning to work together to explore how to better support students. “Building Our Schoolhouse” encourages parents, teachers, students, and other allies to find common ground for a vision for the schools students deserve, and identify plans for working together to create these environments for students. “Network Mapping” will help teachers, parents, and others consider the influences that affect students both in their academic success and in their overall well-being, with the goal of identifying both allies in supporting students and challenges that need to be addressed...