School-Linked Services

School-linked services are health and family services that are provided to students in one or more schools through a variety of linkages. Services may be located at or near a school (e.g., a mobile medical van, a family resource center housed in a modular classroom), provided after school to some students, or students may be referred to services provided by an external agency made available based on an agreement between the school and the provider agency. Appropriate measures to assess the effectiveness of these services differ depending on the form of school-linked services being reviewed.

School-linked services is a label that overlaps with earlier phrases that describe school-connected efforts to connect students with community resources they need to perform in the classroom and to address problems that may impair their learning. Community schools, school-based clinics, full-service schools, learning supports, and family resource centers located at schools are all labels used currently as well as in earlier eras. The emphasis upon linkage is usually intended to signal that services may not be physically located at schools, but are intended to be connected with schools through a variety of administrative and policy agreements among schools and other agencies.

School-linked services are in addition to those health and social services provided by school staff, including psychologists, counselors, social workers, school nurses, and others. Within the broad field of noneducational learning supports, some policy advocates and practitioners have emphasized the need for better connections among the staff already working for schools, while others have emphasized the relatively small number of these professionals compared to the number of students with noneducational problems that affect their learning. That number may be as high as one-third of all students in some schools who are affected by poor health and other factors, including:

• dental, physical, vision, and other health problems;
• inadequate or no health insurance coverage;
• family stress due to substance abuse, low income, family violence, or behavior by the students themselves that involves high-risk sexual activity, substance abuse, or criminal activity and gang involvement.

The need to tap outside agencies that are funded to work with youth is the basis for the argument that school-linked services are a critical supplement to what the school systems' own professionals can accomplish in addressing these problems.

Measuring Effectiveness–Which Outcomes?

A question that arises early in the discussions between school and agency over school-linked services is what standards and measures should be used in assessing the effectiveness of these services. Are they to be assessed based on their impact on the core mission of the school–academic performance by students–or are there other, noneducational measures of the impact of school-linked services on students?

Each party to this discussion has a different starting point. Schools naturally begin the dialog stressing the academic outcomes for which they are held accountable, while other agencies with a greater concern for health, family services, and youth development measure what school-linked services do for students and their parents. The negotiations about goals and outcomes among the sponsoring agencies and schools turn on the relative importance of classroom performance compared with interventions aimed at the external causes of classroom achievement gaps.

School-agency-community partnerships eventually need to move toward agreement on the specifics of the outcomes and indicators to be used as fair measures of progress. Three types of outcomes typically emerge from these discussions, each moving out in a wider circle from a core of education-only outcomes and indicators.

For school-based outcomes, the triad of achievement measured by test scores, attendance, and school completion/graduation rates constitutes the standard that most schools would take seriously as basic measures of school-linked services. Some schools would add the number of suspensions and classroom behavior as measured by disciplinary incidents as indicators of effectiveness. These are the core outcomes for most schools.

In the next circle of outcomes, beyond the classroom, the outcomes are still related to academic achievement, but are no longer restricted to what happens in the classroom. These outcomes include parent involvement, help with homework, reading to primary-age children, and parent engagement with teachers in responding to behavior problems in the classroom.

The third circle consists of those outcomes that are further out into the arenas of community building and youth development, and may include such things as schools' success in attracting community volunteers, children's health coverage in the immediate neighborhood, and the effects of early childhood programs that aim at school readiness goals.

These three circles of outcomes, marked by their increasing distance from academic achievement, set up a further distinction between tightly-linked learning supports, in which the objectives of school-linked services are closely connected with academic achievement and are stronger than in those looserlinked systems in which noneducational goals are given standing independent of their impact on classroom achievement. Experience suggests that the choice of which system is most appropriate should emerge from each district's negotiations with its partners, rather than being mandated by external funders. In a district with weak leadership or strained relations with its surrounding community, academic achievement may be all the partnership can handle. But in a district that has built credibility with its neighbors, parents, and nearby agencies, the wider circles of outcomes may be exactly the right way to take advantage of that history of good relationships.

At the same time, evaluation of school-linked services models in multiple sites underscores the importance of a close fit between what is being measured and what resources are devoted to achieving. To use educational outcomes to measure an after-school program that primarily focuses upon health and recreation goals, rather than academic activities, is not an appropriate use of outcomes. Improved family functioning is unlikely to result from tutoring models and using family functioning scales to measure the effects of such programs is not a good allocation of evaluation resources.

Two other sets of distinctions are also important to keep in mind when evaluating the outcomes of school-linked services.

1. Between short-term and longer-range outcomes, that is, between those outcomes that are markers of movement in the right direction, such as student attendance improvements, and those which are long-term positive results, such as college entrance/completion or mastery of key vocational skills.
2. Between measures of negative behavior–suspensions and expulsions–and measures of positive development. In working with youth, in particular, it is important not to overemphasize those measures that connote negative behavior, as they convey a message that youth are being monitored only for their mistakes. Emphasizing positive accomplishments in developing outcomes provides better feedback to students.

What Is Known About Outcomes?

A recent compilation of evaluation results from forty-nine different community school models was developed by Joy Dryfoos for the Community Schools Coalition, an organization based at the Institute for Educational Leadership. In forty-six of these reports, positive effects were noted. Thirty-six programs reported academic gains, nineteen reported improvements in attendance, eleven reported a reduction in suspensions, eleven reported reductions in high-risk behaviors, twelve reported increases in parent involvement, and six reported safer communities as a result of the initiative. Another compilation, developed by the UCLA School Mental Health Project, provides information on outcomes from a sample of almost 200 programs. These outcomes were organized into six basic areas that addressed barriers to learning and enhance healthy development: (1) enhancing classroom-based efforts to enable learning, (2) providing prescribed student and family assistance, (3) responding to and preventing crises, (4) supporting transitions, (5) increasing home involvement in schooling, and (6) outreaching for greater community involvement and support–including use of volunteers.

The challenges facing evaluation of these initiatives should not be underestimated. Such evaluations seek to separate the effects of programs that were deliberately designed to combine different interventions, aimed at highly disparate student populations that are hard to compare with students not receiving the interventions, and taking place in complex, partially open systems that include large bureaucracies, complex funding streams, and strongly held professional and community values. These evaluation problems correspond closely to those encountered in evaluating comprehensive community initiatives, which have been the subject of several reports by the Aspen Institute Roundtable on Comprehensive Community Initiatives.

Enduring Importance

School-linked services are a continuing effort to respond to educational challenges that arise in the wider community, reminding us that children are in school only 9 percent of the time from birth to adulthood at age eighteen. As schools come under increasing pressure for academic outcomes through discussion of statewide and national testing standards, it is important to recognize that the test scores and academic performance of some children are significantly affected by problems that arise outside the schools and that cannot be addressed by schools alone. It is crucial that that school-linked services are evaluated as broadly as possible in their impacts on academic outcomes as well as their effects in addressing the underlying problems that some students bring to school.