Linking At-Risk Students and Schools to Integrated Services

Critical Issue: Linking At-Risk Students and Schools to Integrated Services

Linda Kunesh

Linda Kunesh, former director of Early Childhood and Family Education at NCREL, comments on the way that Fulton County Schools in Hickman, Kentucky, dealt with the confidentiality issue when they began to work with several agencies from the community. [Audio file, 195k] Excerpted from the video series Schools That Work: The Research Advantage, videoconference #8, Integrating Community Services (NCREL, 1992).

"About the Fulton County situation is the way they dealt with that turf thing and the confidentiality. I just thought it was an incredible strategy, they literarily put on the table the fact that we're not going to deal with confidentiality for the first three months. That was a critical period of time, it gave people an opportunity to know each other, to build repour, to build some trust, and some communities don't always do this."

This Critical Issue was researched and written by Atelia Melaville, consultant and co-author of Together We Can: A Guide for Crafting a Profamily System of Education and Human Services (U.S. Department of Education and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1993), as well as past senior associate at the Center for the Study of Social Policy.

Date posted: 1996