Community Involvement

As I work in a rather large community with a number of schools, I realize that i have almost no contact with the corresponding high school that my student feed into. We also have little community contact, even though that is high on our district's planning. Over the past few months I've stumbled upon a number of methods through which K8 schools can leverage members of the community to increase contact and communication.

High Schools:

Use high school students as part-time tech support. Allow them to do base-level tech support that would otherwise tie up tech support personnel. Create high school partner teams to partner with teachers and provide productivity support. If a teacher wanted a blog set up, they'd email high school students. If they wanted an after school tutoring session on Flickr- use the high school kids. Allow high school students to function as online writing coaches for student blogs and wikis.

Adults:

Allow adults in the community, retired folks or even parents to function as mentors online as well. Allow them to come in and volunteer in labs after school hours. Bring them in the talk about how technology is integrated into their professional lives. 

Colleges:

Bring in college student and/or professors to offer brief in service classes. Contact colleges to see if they'll allow students to make use of facilities and content material. Can staff development be offered through a local college at a reduced tuition that will give teachers a customized staff training opportunity as well as college credit?

As an aside, nearly five years ago I had the chance to offer a community college class to teachers in my district. The local community college was hurting for students and I pitched a class customized to our district's professional development needs. Teachers would enroll and pay tuition to the college, but I could design and then teach the class locally. Unfortunately I didn't fly and we lost the opportunity.