03/05/2001
Mechanicsburg - A Pennsylvania School District: From Divisiveness to Deliberation
Located in what some folks call the "West Shore" of the Susquehana River near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania is the Mechanicsburg Area School District.
The school district serves the mostly residential communities of Upper Allen Township, Shiremanstown, and the town of Mechanicsburg–annual host of Jubilee Day, the largest one-day street fair in the Northeast.
Like many upscale suburbs the Mechanicsburg School District has had a steady growth in the student population of its high school, intermediate school and, especially, its six elementary schools.
Seeking a longer-term solution for the overcrowding than "portable classrooms" and larger class sizes, the school board decided to enlarge the high school and to build a new intermediate school, thus freeing the current intermediate school building to be used in some way to relieve overcrowding in the elementary schools.
The school board decided last year that once the new intermediate school was built, the old intermediate school building would be converted into a 4th and 5th grade center to which all of the district’s 4th and 5th graders would go instead of to their community elementary schools. The decision was met with dissatisfaction, and escalating resistance and anger in the community.
Pressure and discontent grew until the school board decided to find another way to deal with the situation. Having worked before with Harris Sokoloff, Executive Director of the Center for School Study Councils at the University of Pennsylvania, they were familiar with his National Issues Forums (NIF) work promoting deliberative discussion as a way to deal with contentious issues and to build "social capital" in communities.
Along with Dave Dillon, State College area high school social studies teacher, NIF veteran and University of Pennsylvania graduate student, Harris embarked on an innovative project that would, in effect, test how much work and responsibility community members would be willing to take on to resolve a problem facing their schools.
The question before the school district was; What would be the best way to use the old intermediate school building once the new one was built? Harris and Dave’s work with the school district’s problem began by turning that question over to the community.
The project began with an invitation to members of the community to join a "Community Engagement Steering Committee"- often referred to just as the Steering Committee. If any folks showed up expecting to be gradually eased into the process or to be watching from the sidelines while "experts" called the shots, they must have been quite surprised.
The 30 member Steering Committee that first met in August 2000 immediately went to work on the first phase of the project. They began by identifying aspects of the community that were highly valued by residents. They did this during the month of September by gathering groups of residents who created lists of the things that they valued about their school district and community. Volunteers from those work groups then boiled the work down into a list of six community values: sense of community, sense of safety, quality education, participation and involvement, smallness, and economy of scale.
The Steering Committee used the "values list" as a solid platform on which to anchor the next part of their work, which was to produce an issue framework that could be used in community-wide discussions. To get them started, Harris and Dave suggested that their goal should be to develop a discussion guide, or framework, which would respond to the question: "What use of the old intermediate school would best help maintain and support these community values?"
The Steering Committee held three issue-framing workshops during October. All combines, the work that came out of those community workshops pointed toward a discussion framework that would present three possible uses for the old intermediate school building.
Members of the Steering Committee divided up the work of researching and writing the discussion guide. They included an overview of the problem, an explanation of their work on it, the list of community values that had been identified and a presentation of each of the three "choices", including arguments for and against each choice. They titled the finished issue discussion guide, "How to Maintain Quality Education and Address Overcrowding in Elementary Schools." The printed guides were made available to the community at supermarkets, post offices, libraries, and on the school district’s website.
About 90 residents attended the three forums that were held during the first week of January, 2001, where the newly completed discussion guides were used to promote deliberative discussion of the problem. After the forums, the Steering Committee again went to work to digest what had happened during the forums. With Harris and Dave’s help, the Steering Committee wrote a report and Harris presented it to the school board at the end of January. The report was released to the community on January 29th.
Some Steering Committee members have told Harris and Dave they would like to see this process used in the school district for future decisions and problems. They said they appreciated the opportunity to hear each other, and like their new relationship with the school board. Several have said that regardless of the board’s final decision on this issue (still pending as this is written), they experienced a process that, although time and energy consuming, had been worthwhile and satisfying.
Asking the community members to do the work of framing, researching, writing, and rewriting was asking them to do some difficult and demanding work. Although Harris and Dave provided guidance, advice, and support throughout the process, the community had been willing to take ownership of this problem and do the work, making this more than an "exercise" in public engagement.
All communities have different strengths and weaknesses. Some community resources are more important than others when it comes to solving problems together. Although this community had a divisive problem that it was trying to deal with, it also had a certain level of social capital in the form of trust that made a difference in how it could deal with the problem. As Harris said, "This work requires there still be some trust in the community– community trust of and by the school board and administration, as well as community trust of itself and of each other. Starting with examining shared values goes a long way toward building on whatever trust is already there."
(For more information contact Harris Sokoloff or Dave Dillon)
Harris Sokoloff
Center for School Study Councils
Graduate School of Education
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6216
Phone: 215-898-7371
Fax: 215-898-4399
Internet page:
http://www.gse.upenn.edu/cssc/index.html
Public Policy Institute page:
http://www.gse.upenn.edu/cssc/reaching1.html
Dave Dillon
jcd11@scasd.k12.pa.us
800-794-1736
