This guide is designed to help educators and community leaders plan and implement professional development initiatives for family child care providers at the community level, and is based on Dayton Hudson Corporation's 1992 Child Care Aware (CCA) campaign to educate child care consumers about quality family child care. Part 1 provides an overview…

The Long Island Team is a collaborative system of K-12 students and teachers, university students and faculty, and community members who have been linked by telecommunications and in-person sessions. Since 1993 the group has culminated their work together at an annual sharing event. This paper provides the history of the learning community, a list…

The nature of youth gangs is explored, with suggestions for gang prevention and intervention. The emphasis is on organizing citizens, especially at the neighborhood level, to affect all community institutions. Suggestions are offered for citizens' groups to look at critical areas in schooling, incarceration, law enforcement, community programs,…

Mentorships, the art of a creatively productive person teaching, counseling, and inspiring a student with similar interests, can be the result of circumstance or they can be the result of mentorship programs engineered in the academic world. Data collected from over 25 different academic models of mentorship have been distilled into 7 key steps to…

The lives of poor minority city residents demonstrate the diversity, multiple potentials, and vulnerability to external structures. In spite of the stereotypes of failure and the very real problems of the urban poor, there are many strengths among the so-called urban underclass and there are aspects of life that are successful and productive. In…

Since 1987 schools in Baltimore (Maryland) have been working with the Fund for Educational Excellence and the education research center at Johns Hopkins University to develop comprehensive programs of school-family-community partnerships. To understand better how these schools are building and improving their partnership programs, administrators,…

This digest reviews a variety of the policies, programs, and practices to prevent youth violence so that local leaders can base decisions on the experience of other communities. The effectiveness of school violence prevention initiatives is increased by public policies that reinforce their message and by community programs that attempt to prevent…

Focused on the practical tools that education leaders can use to improve communications with their own colleagues, with parents, and with the general public, this guide can be used by school districts and states to organize their communication efforts strategically to build public support. The guide includes step-by-step information to develop a…

This report describes an evaluation study designed to examine two major aspects of a partnership program sponsored by the Science and Mathematics Network of Central Ohio. Those aspects are: (1) changes in partners' perceptions about partnering; and (2) science and mathematics education and the impact of partnerships on the instructional process.…

The Cognitive Enrichment Network Education Model (COGNET) is a program designed to enable children to achieve greater school success by establishing a school-based community of learners. This paper describes COGNET and presents several studies on its effectiveness. The paper begins with a discussion of the model's basic assumptions on child…

Due to the instability of state funding, California's community colleges have turned to the foundation as a source of alternative fundraising and resource development. To gather data on the foundations in place at California community colleges, a survey was conducted of 50 foundation directors, focusing on how their foundations raised money, what…

These three brochures are short guides to show how parents, schools, and communities can support family involvement in education and help build a better educational environment. Noting that communities that support schools and families are better places to live, work, and learn, The "Join Together for Kids" brochure provides information…

Project STEPE (Strengthening Teacher Effectiveness Through a Partnership of Equals), designed to improve instruction, involves collaboration between Western Carolina University and seven rural North Carolina school systems. The consortium also includes several institutions associated with education and rural issues, two community colleges,…

Violence -- particularly violence directed toward and caused by youth -- is clearly a problem. This document systematically addresses this crisis by providing a framework that readers can adapt to their own school and community. The three primary goals are to: (1) demonstrate that violence is preventable; (2) show how individuals can set into…

This paper describes key elements and strategies of a system whereby communities can provide more effective support and service systems. It is intended as an overall framework for improving children's educational outcomes by helping prepare all children for successful participation in school, strengthening family capacities to support their…