Every school exists in context. Externally, the context is the community a school serves. Internally, it is the district in which it is a part. Both the community and the district have a significant impact on the daily life of a school.

Experience demonstrates that an individual school can transform itself into a wonderful teaching and learning environment. If the broader environment—the larger systems in which the school exists—does not understand and support the changes, however, the transformation will eventually be reabsorbed by what labor management consultant Patrick Dolan calls “the steady state” (Dolan, 1994).

What is the steady state? It can be likened to organizational lethargy or entrenched tradition. It manifests itself particularly when any outside partnership that helped launch improvements comes to an end and the school must try to sustain the changes on its own. At this point, members of the school staff may feel like “strangers in a strange land.” The staff members speak a language and behave in a way that other schools and district staff may not understand or may even be resentful of. To make changes lasting and strong, a school community must ensure that comparable changes occur within the larger systems that surround the school.

In addition, students’ educational experiences do not begin and end in one school. School and district staffs need to ensure that the sending school or preschool provider lays a strong foundation for a positive education experience. We also need to assure that the skills, knowledge, and understanding we cultivate among the students in our school are not undermined by their future school experiences in the education system. How? By working with schools in our feeder systems and attending to changes in the district and community as a whole. This is one mark of the integrated systems approach described earlier in this guide. Certainly the public’s perception of effectiveness depends on more than one good experience in one school. The bottom line is that we are all stakeholders in the success of the school system as well as the school.

To ensure that the work going on within schools occurs in a positive, supportive environment, the support of parents and community members as well as district staff is vital. It is also important to provide learning opportunities from outside the school so that staff can gain new perspectives and ideas about their work.

• Partnerships with parents should focus on actively engaging parents in their child’s education as well as involving parents in building and understanding the vision and goals for the school, the classroom, and their child. Efforts at improving parent-school communication should be ongoing.
  
  
• The school district should play a central role in assisting schools with coordinating and linking community services for children, youth, and families with those of the school.
  
  
• Efforts need to be made to connect the community with the school. The academic program should help students and staff be actively engaged in the community.
  
  
• Partnerships with businesses and community organizations need to clearly support the goals of the school and not be random and disconnected activities.
  
  
• The school district and the state educational agency need to be enlisted as partners and help schools create connections with other school practitioners for the purpose of learning from one another.

If you have not already done so, take a closer look at these specific indicators and the areas of this guide that address them.

Indicator 1.1
Shared goals for achievable education outcomes are clear and explicit.

Indicator 1.5
School district administrators support staff efforts and monitor progress toward achievement of goals.

Indicator 2.2
Parents are involved in supporting the work of the school.

Indicator 2.4
Teachers work closely with parents to help students learn and improve education.

Indicator 2.8
Parents, community, and staff other than teachers are involved in decisions about school goals.

Indicator 6.2
Varied, engaging, and collaborative strategies are used in instruction.