School Community Resources Proposal

Abstract
Schools, businesses, and communities come together for the benefit of the schools and families in the neighborhood. This collaboration assists in creating a place for the students and families to thrive and achieve more in school and in other fields. The Anna R. Langford Community Academy endeavors to provide the students with the tools they require in order to succeed in their education. The school also seeks assistance from the organizations and businesses in the community. There are numerous businesses that surround the school and the Englewood neighborhood, but not all the needs of the community have been met and supported. The community service that is proposed in this paper will be completed by the middle school students of Anna R. Langford Community Academy. This proposal will touch on three areas within the community. These areas include tutoring in reading for the students with difficulty, running art shows for the community, and distributing pamphlets for drug education. These are areas that have been neglected within the community and it is vital to support the initiatives that have been launched in order to reduce the number of students with reading problems, encourage other students to take part in arts, and educate the community on the dangers of drugs. These areas will have a huge impact on the families in the neighborhood.
School-Community Service Proposal
Community service-learning is a learning, teaching, and reflective method for educating the community by combining academic activities with meaningful service in the community (Mansour et al., 2016). A lot has been said of how the businesses and the community must be willing and should get involved in the school to assist the school in order to make the school better and improve the lives of young people. However, this involvement is a two-way street. In the same way that the community and businesses work to assist the students, the students should also be willing to assist and to serve in the community within the areas that they can offer help. Englewood is characterized with high rates of crime, drug abuse, and prostitution (Tu, C. 2016). Families living in the area are low income earners and the rate of unemployment for the youth is high. There is need to reduce these rates and the first step will be through education. The age-old adage that education is the key to success is true and looking at the rate of school truancy within the community, one can see why the rates of crime, prostitution, and narcotics is this high within the area. Langford has the potential to positively impact the community by having the students take part in community activities that are beneficial to the community.
Langford has an average of 32% reading growth (Langford overview, 2018). There are numerous students who are struggling to read. Struggling to read is not an isolated case and it should be fully analyzed and action taken. It is for this purpose that we have opted to have the students who excel in reading tutoring the ones who are struggling to read. Not being able to read will result in student receiving improper educational opportunities which will be detrimental to student’s employment success. Langford’s mission is to assure every child receives appropriate instruction (Langford overview, 2018). Therefore, students will be assigned to individual students whom they will coach and peer tutor. The peer-tutoring strategy will encourage the students who have difficulty with reading to better understand and also help encourage the students who have difficulty to be bold enough to ask for assistance from their peers. The students can also be encouraged to tutor other members of the community who have difficulty reading. Positively impacting the community by tutoring community members within the confines of the school would boost the education level of the community. Community members who have to rely on others to read and write for them would now be self-reliant and they would not have to rely on others for assistance.
Langford has been excelling in the arts, which shows that a majority of the students do understand and enjoy the arts (Langford overview, 2018). This is a good thing in that the school can be organizing talent shows for the different student grades where they showcase their talents to the community. Using art, the school can directly impact the community by having plays, musical shows, and art works that address the evils taking place within the community. The students can also use their art talents to reach out to other youths and encourage them to quit evil ways. It is clear that the families within the neighborhood are good at arts and the school can use the students to encourage other community members to take up art as a means for providing for themselves and their families. There are many avenues for growth and there is potential to have sponsors coming in and supporting the students who excel in the arts. Demonstrating to the community that impact that arts have on the school and the positive outcomes that the student demonstrate to the community would be encouraging to other talented youth who were not able to complete education and they too can take up their talents or be discovered for their talents.
Finally, the distribution of pamphlets to the community. Considering the impact that narcotics have on individuals, community outreach on drug prevention in the neighborhood needs assistance to reach to as many people as possible and encourage them to stop abusing drugs. However, without proper funding and staffing most of these centers have not been able to achieve their missions. The students can be given pamphlets, which they can share with the community where they live. The students would only be giving out the pamphlets or brochures to individuals. No student will be allowed to offer any form of counseling or advice. This would also be a nice way of educating the student on the evils of drugs and how they can avoid falling into drugs (Walsh et al., 2014).
The community plan will be multifaceted in that the students will get to learn as they assist other community members. With assistance from their peers, the students who have difficulty in reading would be able to achieve their learning standards and they would be promoted to the next grade without an issue. Peer tutoring has been shown to be effective in improving learning standards for the both the student being tutored and the one tutoring. Reading is a subject area that students should be able to achieve to demonstrate they have managed to perform as expected by the district education board. Art is recognized as a key area in education, and students at Langford have been performing so well in these areas. Connecting the arts with learning standards, educators can use art as a way of educating the students. Using the students’ key talents to impart knowledge will keep them focused and more attentive as they learn. Drug education can be included as a session to be taught within Langford. As the students distribute the pamphlets to the community, many of them will have questions that would need answers. With Langford having a drug education session the students’ questions could be answered by a qualified counselor or health practitioner. This will be beneficial to the students in that they would keep away from the evil of drugs and stay in school. Thus, reducing the number of school dropout and truancy.


References
Langford overview. (2018). Find a School Retrieved from file:///C:/Users/hp/Downloads/ elementary_school_demographics.pdf.
Mansour, M., Martin, A. J., Anderson, M., Gibson, R., Liem, G. A. D., & Sudmalis, D. (2016). Student, home, and school socio-demographic factors: links to school, home, and community arts participation. The Australian Educational Researcher, 43(2), 221-244.
Tu, C. (2016). An economic breakdown of Chicago's Englewood neighborhood. MarketPlace. Retrieved from https://www.marketplace.org/2013/02/11/wealth-poverty/guns-and-dollars/economic-breakdown-chicagos-englewood-neighborhood.
Walsh, M. E., Madaus, G. F., Raczek, A. E., Dearing, E., Foley, C., An, C., . . . Beaton, A. (2014). A new model for student support in high-poverty urban elementary schools: Effects on elementary and middle school academic outcomes. American Educational Research Journal, 51(4), 704-737.