Establishes a process for annual updates to the plan and future decision-making relating to school zone boundaries and possible closings of schools. That program refers students and their families to available resources in the community to address specified needs. To be effective, they need to serve whole families. There are great economies, in addition to greater effectiveness, in one social worker serving an entire family in a case-management approach. This type of system ends the fragmentation of several adults in various levels of schools serving individual students of one family separately, perhaps never communicating with the other adults who are trying to help.
Coordinated services are but one part of the picture.
Another is parent involvement. Currently, the fifth-grade students in an elementary school may be assigned to as many as three different middle schools, and with them their parents to three different parent groups or PTAs. Not only, then, do current feeder patterns destroy the children's friendships, they also destroy the parents' friendships with other parents connected to the school. Just about the time they feel comfortable about allowing their children to go play at another house, or join a study group, or spend the night, or attend a party, then the children are off to separate schools and new relationships, so the work begins anew to establish parent relationships. It is extremely difficult to get fifth and sixth grade teachers together to discuss curriculum and ways to make teaching and learning seamless as students move through the grades from one level or schooling to the next.