Rural communities and their schools are dying. Unless rural schools and their communities can find ways to provide economic vitality and educational opportunity at home, youth will continue to leave, schools will close and communities will vanish. On the other hand, the school is usually the largest employer and greatest capital asset in rural communities. The challenge is to help rural schools lead social, economic, and environmental community revitalization.
The School-Led Community Revitalization project is an exciting and comprehensive community-based school led initiative intended to provide New Mexico's rural school districts the process, resources and leadership needed to lead social, economic and environmental revitalization initiatives within their local communities. This project arose out of the Center for RelationaLearning's partnership with one of our Associates, John Halsey, Executive Director of the Rural Education Forum of Australia (REFA).
- By recognizing the uniqueness of each place, communities can take charge to create their own futures.
- Schools, businesses, and communities can work together as partners in new ways to progress sustainable economic and social development.
- By seeing students as critical community resources, students become active partners in their own education and in the life of their community.
- Parents are key participants in developing effective and sustainable community partnerships.
The untapped potential and ideas of rural communities can be unlocked by focusing on relationships, partnerships and leadership and, most significantly, on schools as sites of rich, extensive expertise and resources.
Six of New Mexico's designated rural school districts agreed to pilot the program beginning April 2005,
with funding from private foundations and the Public Education Department.
For more information about a specific district, please click below:
Tatum ::
Cimarron ::
Jemez Mountain
Jemez Valley ::
Maxwell ::
Loving
A critical component of this program was
the study tour of successful programs in 10 communities in
South Australia. This trip allowed local
educational and community leaders the time to develop their
ideas, interest, and commitment to leading change in their
community.
School districts in New Mexico with a K-12 student population
of 1000 or fewer students face decreasing enrollments, inadequate
funding, and decreasing economic and educational opportunities.
Forming more than half of New Mexico's school districts, the
future of these rural schools and communities will be a major
determinate in the future and vitality of New Mexico as a
whole.
- Population decline and shifts to larger urban centers means that many rural communities are struggling. Youth see no future for themselves and residents are seeing their essential services disappear.
- Changes to primary industries driven by new technologies and changing national and world markets are putting great pressure on individuals and families.
Schools have a rich array of resources in staff, students, facilitators, curriculum and parent networks that can be used in new ways to do a new job - lead the renewal of the community they serve.
This program is unique in that it creates
a public-private partnership to provide training, support,
coordination and technical assistance necessary to initiate
school-led community revitalization in New Mexico's small
rural communities. School-led Community Revitalization
turns the table on current views on the role of schools in
rural revitalization. Instead of seeing schools as isolated
institutions that are often inadequately funded, the program
sees the school as the biggest human and physical resource
within a rural community and therefore a natural leader in
any effort to improve rural communities.
- Community conversations help people identify what they love about their community as a source for creating new educational and economic opportunities.
- Initial involvement begins with a series of "discovery conversations" involving a wide range of the community, including youth, as partners in exploring a critical and open-ended question. That question is, "What is necessary to ensure that rural communities and rural young people in particular, can participate fully in the social, cultural, economic and political life of the state, nation and world?"
- The program develops local champions, including each school district's superintendent, to lead the activities in each community based on local issues, needs, hopes, dreams and opportunities.
- Local capacity is developed by visiting international communities that have successful community school partnerships. Currently, this involves formal study tour arrangements with the Rural Education Forum of Australia and National College for School Leadership in England.
The goal of the School-Led Community
Revitalization Initiative is to establish 48 rural districts
in New Mexico as leaders in social, economic, and environmental
revitalization within their communities. Intended outcomes
include:
- Increased youth, parent and community involvement in local schools
- Increased student performance
- Increased economic development
- Better trained "place based" workforce
- Increased opportunities for Service Learning
- Las Palomas initiated the program in January 2004 with discussions, community conversations, and a regional conference with four Northern New Mexico school districts.
- Beginning February 2004 discussions were held with Charles Hayes and Dr. Veronica Garcia of the newly created Rural Division of the Public Education Department and with other public and private agencies and local foundations.
- Financial resources were secured to conduct a statewide needs assessment for rural schools and to conduct three regional summits to promote the idea of school-led community revitalization.
- In August, the seven pilot schools districts met to share successes and plan implementation and support strategies through the 2005-06 school year.
- In October, all pilot schools as well as other interested rural school districts attended a two-day conference, titled Better Together: Developing Community School Leadership.
- The pilot districts are developing a youth leadership conference for early 2006 to allow students from each community to meet, share ideas and resources on local community learning and service projects.
- Meetings are being held with partners, foundations, and the Governor of New Mexico to ensure that beginning July, 2006 fifteen more rural school districts can join the program and that by 2008 all 48 rural school districts will be active members of this public private partnership.
Through a public private partnership, Las Palomas is working closely with Dr. James Holloway, Assistant Secretary of the Rural Education Division of the Public Education Department (www.ped.state.nm.us/div/rural_ed) to (1) lend technical assistance, planning and implementation support to the current seven pilot sites, (2) bring six to eight new sites into the program, (3) develop formal working agreements with partners, (4) finalizing an operational plan for the program, (5) and fundraising with various foundations, state agencies, the Governor's office and the State Legislature.
There are two fifteen-minute DVDs that document this approach in two of the pilot communities, Jemez Valley and Tatum. Please contact CRL if you are interested in purchasing one of these DVDs.
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