Why Community is Important to Education



Teachers, parents and students all agree that parent engagement in schools has increased over the past 25 years. Given the role that family and community engagement plays in not only academic success, but life success, that is great news.

Oftentimes, the onus for providing a well-rounded educational experience for every student falls directly on the shoulders of the school administrators, teachers, faculty, and staff. However, this limited perspective overlooks the fact that much of a child’s life and education occurs outside the classroom. What happens before the school day starts and after it ends can be just as important and impactful in the lives of your students as what happens during the traditional school day. This is why community engagement and involvement in schools is such an important facet of the educational process.

Consistent community involvement and engagement at all levels of the school have been shown to have significant short and long term benefits. When schools, parents, families, and communities work together to support learning, students tend to earn higher grades, attend school more regularly, stay in school longer, and enroll in higher-level programs. With these important benefits in mind, it’s clear that a focus on increasing community involvement programs and opportunities should be a consistent goal for your school.

For example, Sequoyah School offers a lot of opportunities for parent education and community engagement. Curriculum chats and social and emotional learning forums are facilitated by administrators to inform parents and strengthen communication between home and school, and the school proactively guides parents in finding ways that they can become meaningfully involved in volunteer efforts during the school year. For students, teachers integrate service learning initiatives with class curriculum, beginning in the younger years with a focus on what is happening in the surrounding neighborhood and extending in the high school years to a social innovation program in which students addresses complex societal challenges.

The Sequoyah School is located at 535 South Pasadena Avenue, Pasadena. Call (626) 795-4351 or visit http://www.sequoyahschool.org/ for more information.

 

 

 

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