Philadelphia Inquirer / November 22, 2105

To Otis Hackney, it felt like a wonderland.

There were vision, medical, and dental clinics. A food bank. A day-care center and a mental-health wing with five therapists. Volunteers trooped into the school routinely, part of a rotation of well-trained help that works one-on-one with Oyler’s kids.

“I thought,” the South Philadelphia High principal said later, “it was awesome.”

Oyler is a “community school,” a phrase about to become much more familiar in Philadelphia, where the mayor-elect has pledged to establish 25 of them in four years.

The idea is simple: Don’t just teach kids in schools. Meet their basic needs, concentrating social, health, and other services inside as a way to better reach families, allowing educators to focus solely on instruction. The schools primarily serve students but offer resources to those in the neighborhood, too.

“Schools can’t do everything,” said Julie Doppler, Cincinnati Public Schools’ point person on the issue. “Kids fall through the cracks, but community partners pick them up. This removes the barriers kids are facing in the classroom.”

Cincinnati, which is moving to an all-community schools model, credits the movement with boosting academic achievement and graduation rates.

Its model costs schools relatively little, about $65,000 per year per building, with funds usually coming from a mix of federal Title I money set aside for poor schools, and from other fund-raising. It’s incumbent on the community organizations that provide the extras to make the model work financially, usually by billing Medicaid or through their own budgets.

A culture shift
Hackney, who this month was named Mayor-elect Jim Kenney’s chief education officer, was part of a delegation that traveled to Cincinnati in September to see the city’s acclaimed community schools firsthand. Kenney and City Council President Darrell L. Clarke, long a booster of the model, visited Cincinnati themselves Friday; along with teachers’ union president Jerry Jordan, they will talk up community schools at a news conference scheduled for Monday.

The building Hackney has spent five years nursing back to health is the closest thing Philadelphia has to a community school.

South Philadelphia High had some partners before Hackney arrived in 2010, but he added more, and has been firm with the ones who stayed – who are you serving, how does what you do match up with school goals, are kids doing better because of your service? It was a real culture shift, he said.

At Oyler, Hackney moved through the hallways with a sense of wonder, asking questions about how this program worked, how staff clear that procedure with the school district. In a quiet, bright room usually used for mentors to meet with students, he described his approach at “Southern,” as the school is known: high expectations, high supports, many of them coming from outside the cash-poor School District….

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