Work with businesses and social service agencies

Work with businesses and social service agencies.

Several new roles for districts evolve from the need to provide coherent access to social services for the increasing numbers of poor, language and ethnic minority, immigrant, and other at-risk students in the nation's schools. One new role calls for the school board and superintendent to establish formal mechanisms for discussion with the community's government and business officials.

These discussions would have three major goals:

Reach an understanding that all parts of the community must work together to improve the health as well as the physical, social, emotional, and educational condition of its children. Leaders would begin thinking about child development issues and policies affecting children holistically, rather than focusing on these matters individually.
Develop policies that encourage lower-level managers and service providers to work together to craft strategies for coherently providing education and other services to children. One possible result would be the relocation of health, physical, emotional, family, and other social services to centers at or near school sites - i.e., places where children congregate daily.
Enact policies that allow social service agencies to provide a coherent set of services at these new locations. Such policies could include:
- Adopting a common eligibility form that would trigger service from all agencies rather than requiring separate forms for each type of service
- Allowing service providers to "pool" funds from multiple sources to finance a caseworker for each student
- Allowing the caseworker to broker the multiple services that at-risk students usually need
- Helping each district or school site become Medicaid-eligible, which would expand the availability of health services that most districts now need but cannot afford - especially for low-income children and their families