This paper examines how community colleges are responding to external pressures to more closely collaborate with secondary schools in school reform efforts and school-to-work transition programs, focusing on four community colleges. These colleges engaged in a wide variety of collaborative activities with secondary schools. Two strong examples of significant systemic collaboration were found, where capacity-building strategies and program-creation strategies were combined on a large scale. The two examples were 2+2 programs with well-defined career majors at high school connected to community college technical degree programs. Although the collaborative efforts identified did little to change the nature of preparation within either secondary schools or community colleges, the more intensive collaborations seem to have forged broad-based participation on a wise range of shared interests. Sections in the report are: (1) Introduction--includes data collection methods and analysis; (2) Findings--presents findings from each of the four colleges and discusses current forms of collaboration; (3) Analysis--discusses the role of federal funding, factors promoting collaboration, and impacts on community colleges; and (4) Conclusions and Implications. (RDG)