Community and Schools

Stacey Harker
Royal Roads University
EDLM 540
Lisa Read
November 25, 2012

A Consideration of the Relationship between Community and Schools

The Vancouver School Board (VSB) established its Continuing Education program in 1907 to offer affordable community based learning opportunities. In the 1970’s, this program grew to include an academic program for adults who had not graduated from high school (VSB Continuing Education). Laid off resource industry workers whose skill set was ill suited for the changing economy made up a significant proportion of the student community. To appeal to the adult student, the program featured self-paced courses with one-to-one instruction and flexible hours. Typically resources consisted of a room or two, a teacher or two, tables, filing cabinets, and textbooks. The system soon broadened to include the growing number of single mothers and course design featured lessons that could be completed while a baby napped.

While these learning communities have not disappeared in the intervening years, they have been superseded by other communities seeking high school graduation. This includes educated immigrants en route to renewing their professional standing in Canada, high school graduates upgrading their college entrance requirements, along with many students with learning challenges. Today, the VSB Adult Education program serves approximately 2500 students in six centres. In continued attempt to respond to the increasingly diverse realities of being an adult high school student, courses are delivered online, on paper, face-to-face, in drop-in centres, and in traditional classrooms. The schools are still community based, but the largest is situated next to a SkyTrain station and thereby serves a geographically broad community.

The community surrounding my school is perhaps not more culturally diverse than in the past but the ratios are altered. When I began teaching 20 years ago, usually one or two of my grade 12 English students had English as a second language. Today this is reversed, with only one or two of my English 12 students having English as their mother tongue. The community’s increased diversity influences not just course offerings and delivery, but how the school develops and maintains a complexity of relationships with the students. To that end, each school now employs an Outreach Worker who fosters connections between the school and the community. This was not the case when my parents went to high school.

In the 1950’s, high school was a place to get an education. If a student did not graduate, there remained options for employment. In this social climate, schools were not as pressured to respond to student diversity because students who did not fit in had alternate avenues for pursuing success. These avenues have changed with an economy that increasingly demands academic skills for employment.

First in their families to pursue postsecondary education, my parents were considered remarkable and both had remarkable careers. By the time I attended high school in the 1980’s, it was expected that I would attend university in order to get a decent job. Today, my children are growing up in a society where they are required to attend university, and I can only hope that they will be able to support themselves financially. With fewer options for success without education, schools are compelled to address increasing diversity in the student population. This has resulted in more flexible and dynamic schools because traditional classroom instruction is an inadequate resource to help every student complete a high school course, let alone graduate.
Today, Adult Education is a distinct branch of Continuing Education at the VSB. Nevertheless, it continues the tradition of offering accessible community based education by responding to the diverse and changing needs of the community in efforts to lead all students toward academic success and employability. Although I would like to think that this is a result of wise school leadership, I am just as inclined to see this change as led by communities which have little choice other than to respond to the basic need of gainful employment. Either way, it is clear that schools and communities are closely linked.
References

Vancouver School Board Continuing Education. Retrieved from http://ce.vsb.bc.ca/Pages/about-us.aspx, November 24, 2012.