1 Chapter One Introduction to the Study in the Spring
Chapter One Introduction to the Study In the spring of 1989, a 9-year-old boy was gunned down in the streets of a major city in The United States. The horror of this homicide was that both the victim and the assailant were children. During the 1980s this city, like most other large urban cities, was besieged by a growing number of violent acts: assaults, thefts, rapes, homicides, suicides, hate crimes, extortions, and destructions of property, but the murder of this young child became the catalyst which propelled specific action. In this case, a community educational organization called The Cottage Family and Child Care Center, which is the subject of this study, was created. Curcio and First (1993) write that “we can do more than just cope” in our “efforts to proactively defuse and prevent violence” (p. 50). As an antidote to growing violence in our schools and communities, they support the concept of community involvement and the relatively new notion of full-service schools (p. 35). School-linked services, full-service schools, or school community connections are terms which have been surfacing during the last decade and mean different things to people, depending upon their background and experience. While recognizing the semantic challenge that exists and the diversity of actual program designs represented by these terms, some commonality is beginning to surface in the literature. Adler (1994) identifies a number of common threads that weave through various definitions of school-linked or community-linked services: neighborhood accessibility, collaboration for holistic purposes, prevention rather than crises orientation, new systems, flexibility of funding, staff development, and system-wide changes (p.
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