City Beat Cover Story / May 27, 2015
The Community Learning Center concept is galvanizing the national consciousness and has catapulted Cincinnati to the forefront of the conversation. For the comprehensive and analytical approach to defining the Community Learning Center model, look no further than the website for the Cincinnati-based Community Learning Center Institute, which has branded the vision: “leveraging (of) public school facilities to become hubs of educational, recreational, cultural, health and civic partnerships, which optimize the conditions for learning and catalyze the revitalization of the community.”
This call to arms is a far cry from the notion of the one-room schoolhouses of old that gathered multi-age learners for a precious few hours of instruction before those young students needed to shift to working the land on family farms. Back then, the school was not a primary concern — that schoolhouse, in fact, might have likely been seen as a waste of land, if it were not also used as a place of worship and, in some cases, a community or town hall.
Development and specialization over the years stripped away those extraneous functions while allowing for the expansion of the “schoolhouse” into a strictly academic facility. Fast forward to the technological age we currently find ourselves in, where the focus is on testing and outcomes and the school is, to some extent, even more of a data-driven processor, a place where true learning must be quantifiable at each stage of the process. There is little personal investment in the process or the place.
But the Community Learning Center Institute wants to recalibrate our thinking. All of the language addressing the strategies and implementation of goals and objectives rooted in the “five foundational elements” is there, but the very human heart and soul of the model returns again and again to the idea of the school as the town/community center. And one of the key ways this comes to life is through the sharing of stories, because when students and families can illustrate their connectedness, the school achieves a larger mission as a resource hub and something more — the school becomes a neighborhood character.
Darlene Kamine, the executive director and founder (in 2009) of the Community Learning Center Institute, is the ideal spokesperson for this approach because she instinctively appreciates the idea that to support and promote such reform demands being a skilled storyteller. I spoke with her days before the local premiere of Amy Scott’s documentary Oyler (made in association with American Public Media’s Marketplace as part of their award-winning radio series “One School, One Year”).
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