In nearly every community there are agencies of one kind or another that provide differing degrees of support to children and families. This is particularly important for families in greatest need of outside support. These agencies might be the traditional government human services or health services agencies. Support also might come from various not-for-profit agencies or from churches and institutions of faith. Unfortunately, it is not very common for all the entities providing support for families to work together to provide a seamless, interdependent network of support. There are usually different levels of sophistication in networking. Sometimes agencies dealing with housing or workforce development can be part of the mix. In some communities, communication among these groups will be fairly good and that communication is the basic level needed for interagency effectiveness. The next higher level of effectiveness for communities is some genuine coordination of services which avoids duplication in a resource-scarce environment and helps to ensure that those resources can provide the broadest safety net.
The highest level of effective community support for families is true collaboration among all these providers where they can be reliant on each other’s resources and are willing to alter their plan of services so that the total group can provide the most seamless coordination of services to all families at various levels of need. Agencies at this level of collaboration understand each other’s funding sources, along with their flexibility and limitations, and they are willing to meld them together for a common good when possible. Communities operating at this level may even have a common group of goals, indicators and metrics to jointly assess progress.
Sadly, schools and school districts are most often found only at the communication level in these partnerships. Sometimes schools will participate in coordination of services, but true collaboration is much less frequent. Certainly, school districts must be mindful of the restrictions set out in regulations surrounding the funds they receive. School districts often do not have the luxury of staff time that can be dedicated to the increased time needed for true collaboration. Sometimes school districts see their mission as limited to only serving children as though they can be served separately from families. Finally, there is a perception that a district that spends too much energy in consort with agencies serving needy families, it might be seen as a district more defined by needy families rather than the rest.
The needs of children and their families really demand that schools and school districts be part of true community collaboratives. While school districts typically have the largest amount of resources among community agencies, their greatest asset is not financial. It is the fact that they are linked to nearly all the families and, as such, they have a credibility to actually lead the collaborative. The barriers to such collaboration are less often about financial regulations or information sharing than they are about the political will and the commitment of energy needed to demand that education must be a service to families, as well as to the children those families.
In spite of these barriers for school districts, true collaboration can happen with relative ease. It happens in very small school districts when people know each other so well that, when a particular family becomes distressed, a collaborative response is initiated. The need becomes clear and personal and the visible need elicits the flexibility and collaboration needed to provide solution for that family. It might be housing and basic needs in the aftermath of a fire or the more familiar rural story of help in bringing in the crops in the face of some other tragedy.
If we can create shared clarity and commitment around a need, then we can create collaboration toward a solution.