At the State of the Union address on January 8, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson announced nothing less than a crusade. It was a crusade for a noble end, launched on behalf of the nation's poor (Caro, 2012). Johnson said:
Unfortunately, many Americans live on the outskirts of hope—some because of their poverty, and some because of their color, and all too many because of both. Our task is to help replace their despair with opportunity. This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America. Our chief weapons will be better schools, and better health, and better homes, and better training, and better job opportunities to help more Americans, especially young Americans, escape from squalor and misery and unemployment.
The speech announced also the crusade's goal, which was revolutionary: "Our aim is not only to relieve the symptom of poverty, but to cure it and, above all, to prevent it."In the winter of 2012, as I sat at the long, grey, oval-shaped conference table typical of most offices, looking forward to yet another riveting administrative team update, our superintendent took the chair at the head of the table looking particularly distressed. Her drawn face, pursed lips, and worried expression wordlessly warned us all that bad news was coming.
Track season was underway, and our high school's strongest runner was not participating because her family could not afford the track shoes and could not find a way to transport her to practice and meets. "This is her ticket out, a scholarship, but she can't take advantage of this opportunity," our superintendent explained. As we examined the problem, our administrative team began to recognize that our suburban district was not immune to the devastating, opportunity-stealing effects of poverty.
Suburban Demographic Shift
Although many have researched urban and rural school-community partnerships (e.g., Corbett, 2007; Ralph, 2003; Snipes, Williams, & Petteruti, 2006), studies examining community involvement in suburban schools are few and far between (Preston, 2013). Meanwhile, suburban poverty is on the rise. According to Kneebone and Berube (2013), between 2000 and 2012, the number of suburban poor living in distressed neighborhoods grew by 139 percent. Of residents living in poverty in the nation's 100 largest metro areas, 26 percent lived in the suburbs from 2008 to 2012, up from 18 percent in 2000 (Kneebone & Berube, 2013).
For example, in 2008, the suburbs of four of seven Ohio cities (Cincinnati, Cleveland, Dayton, and Toledo) housed more poor residents than the central cities (Kneebone & Berube, 2013). In both Cincinnati and Youngstown, more than 70 percent of the poor population resided in the suburbs. This data suggests that, in terms of absolute numbers, poverty is a more extensive problem in the suburbs of many of Ohio's largest cities than in the cities themselves. However, several sources note the paucity of research related to how schools manage demographic shifts in suburban school districts (Diarrassouba & Johnson, 2014; Holme, Diem, & Welton, 2013; Turner, 2015).
Communities Are Social Capital
A well-organized school-community partnership can be an important weapon in the war on poverty. In a concerted effort to address growing barriers to educational access as a result of poverty, my suburban Ohio school district created a Community Connectedness Committee in the spring of 2012. The purpose of this group is to identify and remove nonacademic barriers to academic success.
The group is comprised of ex-school board members, the former mayor of the city, longtime community supporters, parents, PTA members, and administrators. During meetings, group members check their titles at the door, roll up their sleeves, and get to work to address the needs of students and families. This can range from providing coats, hats, and gloves to reaching out to attorneys to help families with immigration processes. The group norms are straight forward: (a) no one does this work for personal recognition or praise and (b) there is a relentless focus on outcomes—meetings are not about talk without action. Each month's meeting begins with an update about what problem was resolved since the last meeting.
Outcomes for Students
This school year, we set our focus by using the Stanford design school model for goal setting, where community members share a compelling question and then brainstorm potential solutions to the problem in small-group sessions. Compelling questions raised by community members include (a) How can we provide transportation to students so that they can participate in after school activities? (b) How can we provide healthy snacks to hungry students during the school day? and (c) How can we stop achievement gaps before they start by increasing access to quality preschool programs? Leveraging their social capital, the community members arranged partnership meetings with the local library to create research-based after-school reading intervention programs run by community volunteers. To date, the school-community partnership has developed after-school intervention programs, funded extra-curricular activities and school trips, found community members to take in children who became homeless during the school year, and joined forces with a local food pantry to provide a continuous supply of items for families in need. The committee is relentlessly dedicated to drilling down to the root of the barriers to educational access.
This example of one suburban school district's response to demographic change suggests that involving the community in identifying problems and creating potential solutions can have beneficial outcomes for students. "When relationships are rooted in trust," Robert Putnam writes, "people interact more effectively, honestly, and openly, generating higher levels of collaboration and communication" (2007). Supporting community involvement in school creates social capital among school staff, parents, and community members. Collective ownership of the problem creates a space for empathetic understanding, which, in turn, increases the collective responsibility citizens feel for each other and for their youth.