Going to Scale with School-Community Collaborations.

Expanding Pilot Programs Districtwide Requires Capacity Building and skill Development

The dramatic increase in numbers of school-community collaborations that coordinate education, social services, health care, and other services to support needy children and families has touched nearly every community over recent years.

These new arrangements emphasize prevention over crisis intervention, comprehensive collaboration over single-issue categorical programs, family focus over individual treatment, and flexibility over rigid bureaucracy. Even the names of some programs reflect the spirit and purpose behind the movement: Caring Communities, Even Start, Healthy Start, New Beginnings, and New Futures.

Typically school-community collaborations lead to the creation of family centers at or near a school, where assistance to disadvantaged students and families ranges from transportation or tutoring to long-term family counseling. Collaborating agencies work out kinks in policies and agreements, reducing the fragmentation, overlap, and gaps in services to children and families in order to improve their educational, health, and social outcomes.

If your school district has a school-community collaborative--and chances are it does given the recent explosion in such efforts--it likely was set up as a demonstration, pilot, or one-of-a-kind effort. Probably there's an implicit assumption that, if the project is successful, the same personalized, comprehensive services will be extended to children and families served by other schools in the district.

Demonstrations, however, usually depend on an infusion of additional resources to get off the ground: extra money, time for planning, and staff development. Initially, they also may involve special staffing, redeployment of partner agency staff, and special agreements with agencies. How can you extend the family center approach used in the demonstration at one school to several? How do you make the special case part of the mainstream--or in the parlance of school reformers, how do you "go to scale?"

Scaling Defined

Scale is a relative term. In one sense, scale refers to implementation within a geopolitical unit--a school district, city, county, or state. A second aspect of scale is the proportion of the population to be included. As Charles Bruner, director of the Center for Child and Family Studies in Des Moines, Iowa, points out in his background paper on this subject for a 1993 Wingspread Conference sponsored by the National Center for Services Integration, being at scale also means providing services to all those eligible.

Third, going to scale means implementing an innovation at a system level, where key institutional and political barriers and issues are present. School-community collaborations are designed to fill gaps and reduce fragmentation in the system of services for children, and as the program matures, a ripple effect inevitably will lead to barriers associated with state, local, and federal regulations and policies.

Despite efforts to disseminate and extend educational and social innovations across the country, going to scale is something we still know little about. For one thing, the task is much more difficult than that of extending innovations within a single school or classroom. No blueprints exist and little systematic investigation is taking place into what it takes to scale up an innovation.

Nonetheless, interest in the issue of scaling up has increased in the last several years, and we're beginning to learn more about how to spread school-community collaborations and make them stick. Evidence of this interest can be detected well beyond school circles. Discussions such as those at the Wingspread Conference suggest state and local policymakers are intrigued with the idea.

More important is the fact that several locations are attempting to scale up existing school-community partnerships. St. Louis's Caring Communities program is being expanded statewide through seven community partnerships orchestrated by the Family Investment Trust, a public/private partnership set up in 1993. The effort already has spawned 64 Caring Community sites in Missouri serving an estimated student population of 22,000.

In Los Angeles, 16 schools received grants in the last few years through California's Healthy Start, an ongoing statewide initiative to spread school-linked services. The school district set out to expand the services available to children and families through high school, middle school, and elementary clusters. These services are offered at a family center located at a high school within each cluster. The collaboration started in 17 clusters in 1995-96 and will move to 10 more this year.

Because of the experiences in these and other places, we are coming to know more about what scaling up is--and what it is not. How to get there remains the challenge.

Common Features

Going to scale is not a matter of replication, cookie-cutter style. Nor is it a mandated, top-down process. Instead, scaling up has to do with developing the context and tools for change. It demands capacity building and continued support for change. Until key players--teachers, social workers, nurse practitioners, administrators, and community members--are ready and until they have the skills and understand that going to scale will require entirely new approaches, there's little chance the collaboration will take hold.

What is transported then are the principles, attitudes, and process associated with school-community collaborations. As Phyllis Rozansky, director of Caring Communities in Missouri, says: "It's not a program, it's an approach." A 1994 report by Replication and Program Strategies Inc. on the expansion of successful social programs called this "concept" replication because it is the strategy, principles, and ideas that are extended.

A key feature of concept replication, according to the same report, is adaptation to the local context. This asset is particularly important in school-community collaborations since most are built around one neighborhood and the agencies that work there. The whole idea of collaboration is that the school and family center staff get to know the families in the area, their specific needs, and the barriers they face in getting access to services. Then, working in concert, the participating agencies can improve services.

When extending the approach to another community, it is essential the design of the collaboration match the local context. Rachel Lodge, associate director of California's Healthy Start field office, says she encourages grantees to be "faithful to the process, not the particular design of Healthy Start programs."

Ensuring Equity

A major reason for scaling up is to provide greater equity across community lines and offer similarly coordinated services to all children and families. When one school and neighborhood benefits from a Cadillac-level of services and others lack even a car, there is reason for concern.

In California, most Healthy Start grantees receive $400,000 in state funding over three years. Thus, when Los Angeles began to scale up its Healthy Start programs, John DiCecco, director of restructuring for the Los Angeles Unified School District, explained, "One school would have it all, and another two miles away had nothing."

Under the new arrangements, students in the high school clusters will receive some help that the Healthy Start sites do though not to the same degree. The school district sought to scale up to new sites but not "dampen entrepreneurship" at the original Healthy Start schools. In effect, it has meant a different level of program in the new sites. In time, however, as the grant money expires, resources within the school district will become more balanced.

While some grant money might be available for expansion sites, administrators would do well to search for additional funding sources because sufficient grant money may not be forthcoming. Missouri is using federal Family Preservation and Family Support Services funds, and the Los Angeles program is supported through Title XI of the Improving America's Schools Act. Several school districts have tapped Medicare funding or used a portion of Title 1 money as "glue" to support interagency collaboration. The options for new money are limited.

In California's Healthy Start, expansion sites and those reaching the end of their grants are encouraged to look first to their collaborative partners, not just to new grant sources. "Healthy Start was always intended to be self-sustaining," explained Lodge, the associate director of the state field office.

Program directors also should anticipate upcoming resource needs. In Elk Grove, Calif., Superintendent David Gordon found ways to support the Healthy Start programs a year and a half before the funding ran out. For one thing, the school district obtained a waiver from the state allowing them to offer broader preventive services.

More importantly, the superintendent convinced his school board that the collaborations were a good investment so school-community collaborations now are supported through the general fund. "We made the case that these projects were benefiting the basic program, which is kids learning, and we were able to back it up with results," Gordon explains. He also stressed the need for good evaluation data. Without it, expansion and even continuation would be jeopardized.

Evaluation of the collaboration and reporting is critical to scaling up for several reasons: (1) to determine whether the collaboration is effective and should be expanded; (2) to convince funders; and (3) to attract new sites and partners. Even data on attendance or parent satisfaction can carry weight. Measuring the savings from prevention is difficult since, by definition, we expect the outcome of prevention to be nothing. Nevertheless, schools can compile and report stories where they have seen savings or extrapolate them from the services provided. In Elk Grove, volunteer dentists conducted 7,000 free dental screenings and uncovered urgent care needs in more than 10 percent of the youngsters. The potential savings in dental services and missed school were considerable.

Successful scaling up also may depend on one's ability to monitor legislation and funding-and not just in education. The late '90s will be a time of dramatic change in social policy in this country with anticipated reform in education, health, and welfare. The trend not only will be one of downsizing, but also shifts from categorical programs toward block grants and greater accountability.

Localized Factors

Michael Fullan says in his 1992 book, The New Meaning of Educational Change, that changing people and institutions is best accomplished by applying a few "powerful themes." Because scaling up school-community collaborations will occur on a case-by-case basis and depend on local interest, commitment, and capacities, two complementary approaches seem most appropriate: (1) a focus on capacity building and (2) support of professional development. The job of the reformer is in getting that classroom, school, or community ready.

To spread from a single interagency collaboration site requires you build capacity and support for the change process in other communities. Capacity building means creating a vision, fostering buy-in, and developing local leadership. It also means developing the institutional norms and incentives that will support change.

A vision of how to design comprehensive services for children and families no doubt gave birth to the first collaborations in the district. In new settings, the challenge is to help the people come up with their own vision of where they can go-what fits for that school and that community.

Capacity also can be built through eliciting commitment and buy-in from key constituents-schools, districts, service agencies, and the community. These groups must foresee tangible payoffs for themselves and a reason for them to be at the table, and buy-in has to start at the top with superintendents, school principals, agency heads, and community leaders. If integrating services comes to be seen as a way to improve the responsiveness, efficiency, and cost of children's and family services, then a real chance exists for large-scale implementation. Unless agencies and the community they serve see an advantage for adopting a school-linked services approach, they won't do it.

New sites also will need local leadership if they are to succeed. You need someone who has interest, credibility, and time to bring off an interagency partnership. While most family centers are run by a social worker or counselor, this doesn't have to be the case. In Elk Grove, the coordinators of the two family centers were former classroom teachers.

Finally, the capacity of a community for integrating services will depend on its ability to create the institutional norms and incentives that support change and legitimate new practices. Unless people receive credit for working differently or taking on new roles and responsibilities, they are unlikely to change. School districts and schools can value contributions to children's non-academic needs, and they can reward teachers and principals who build bridges to other educators and service professionals.

Skill Development

Richard Elmore, a Harvard professor, suggests in the Spring 1996 issue of Harvard Educational Review that successful scaling up of an educational innovation should include an explicit theory of how practitioners will acquire the knowledge and skills associated with the innovation. Dissemination of most educational reforms simply has assumed that if you tell teachers, say, about a new instructional strategy in a one-day workshop and give them materials, they will begin to use it immediately, figuring out how to incorporate it into their lessons along the way.

But people don't acquire new knowledge that way. Instead, training should be structured to build the knowledge and experiences people will need to actually implement an innovation. Elmore recommends such an approach include direct observations, real-world trial-and-error applications, and feedback.

Another key dissemination approach should be to bring professionals together for sharing and networking. Other recent studies show that teachers and other school staff learn new practices most effectively when they have ongoing access to colleagues to share and discuss experiences and ideas.

Everything we know about institutional change suggests people-to-people connections make change happen much more readily than verbal or written directives. In scaling up Caring Communities, for instance, the Family Investment Trust convened principals of all 64 schools for a multi-day conference at which they exchanged ideas and experiences about their changing roles and their relationships with the interagency program coordinators in their schools.

Rozansky, who directs the trust, says the most important part of scaling up is building relations. Prospective partners and staffs have to be given ample opportunity to establish new relationships face to face.

Those most critical to the success of the project--teachers, social workers, nurses, counselors, and others in daily contact with children and their families-- should not be left out of the process. Because of their on-site duties, these staff members often are excluded from training sessions or meetings. Instead, administrators tend to be the ones who benefit from these more formal learning opportunities.

Change strategies that rely on the connections between front-line staff may be more effective in the long run than the top-down approach specified by administrators and policy makers. Their cross-agency training is important not only for the knowledge and skills it develops, but because it provides an opportunity for these key players to get to know and understand each other.

Demonstration sites can be an effective part of this approach. The original site or other collaboratives can host visits from network members that allow those just starting to see how a collaboration works in practice. It also gives those on site a chance to get feedback from interested outsiders. Nothing can bring a group farther in their development than to see the program in operation.

Another important element is providing ongoing professional support through change agents or coaches. In Los Angeles, "organization facilitators," selected from those student health and human service providers with experience in working with community agencies, provide planning and technical support to the new high school clusters.

Complex Endeavor

Going to scale will not be easy and will require time and money. Because school-community collaborations vary so much in their cost and funding sources, it's difficult to estimate how much scaling up might cost. We do know, however, that it can't be done overnight. We must be prepared for the long haul.

Expanding school-linked services is at least as complex as major educational reforms because it involves multiple agencies and a larger number of bureaucracies and egos. Nevertheless, if key issues are addressed with sufficient care and attention and if we apply the lessons learned by those who already are scaling up their partnerships, there's a good chance to successfully spread school-community collaborations.

Lessons for Scaling Up

Based on his experiences trying to spread school-community collaborations, Larry Guthrie offers the following suggestions:

No. 1: Make sure you can demonstrate success before starting to expand.

No. 2: Going to scale is not replication, cookie-cutter style.

No. 3: Be clear about what's being extended-not the program but the concept or approach.

No. 4: Adapt to the local context in new sites.

No. 5: Plan far in advance for funding and support.

No. 6: Seek equity across sites without diluting services at the demonstration sites.

No. 7: Invest in documentation and evaluation.

No. 8: Focus on capacity building: creating a vision, developing commitment, building local leadership, and creating institutional norms and incentives that support changes.

No. 9: Support professional development that includes a definite plan about how people will learn and develop new skills through networking, coaches, observations, trial and error, and feedback.

Additional Resources

How to Coordinate Services far Students and Families, by Larry F. Guthrie, available from Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 1250 N. Pitt St., Alexandria, Va. 22314-1453

Realizing a Vision for Children, Families, and Neighborhoods: An Alternative to Other Modest Proposals, by Charles Bruner, available from National Center for Service Integration c/o Child and Family Policy Center, 218 Sixth Avenue, Suite 1021, Des Moines, Iowa 50309-4006

"Going to Scale with a Comprehensive Services Strategy," proceedings from a 1993 Wingspread Conference, available from National Center for Service Integration (see above)

"Building From Strengths Replication as a Strategy for Expanding Social Programs That Work," available from Replication and Program Strategies Inc., 1617 JFK Blvd., Suite 1390, Philadelphia, Pa. 19103

"The Path of Most Resistance: Reflections on Lessons Learned from New Futures." available from Annie E. Casey Foundation, 701 St. Paul St., Baltimore, Md. 21202