We just launched How to Establish a Church/School Partnership For Individuals and For Groups. If your church is looking for a way to do its ministry in the world, consider taking this course and learning how to develop a supportive relationship with a high-needs public school in your community.
Ben Campbell, co-founder of the Micah Association, an organization of partner faith communities and public schools in Richmond, Virginia, calls public education “the most Christian institution in America” because everybody across the multiple social, ethnic, racial, and economic divides in our nation can be involved with it. Schools with a large percentage of students facing poverty, however, need a great deal of extra assistance in order to put their students in a position to achieve success. Churches can help by creating partnerships with local schools to offer them long term assistance.
Creating a partnership with a school isn’t always an easy task, but the rewards can be great for everyone involved. In this course, instructors who have participated in successful church/school partnerships or who work with agencies that facilitate such partnerships offer suggestions about the steps that churches should take in initiating, creating, and maintaining successful partnerships with local schools.
The instructors for this course have a lot to offer on the subject of church/school partnerships. In addition to Ben Campbell, Liz Steinhauser, our second instructor, directs St. Stephen’s Youth Programs, which began as a church effort to provide children with a safe place to go when school was not in session and became an organization with multiple programs working to support over 850 children in the Boston area. Lallie Lloyd, who instructs the last two lessons of this course, is founder and director of All Our Children National Network, a Boston-based organization whose mission is to “promote, support, and strengthen effective faith-rooted community partnerships with under-resourced public schools.”
We hope that you will take the time to learn from these instructors about how to do the work of God on behalf of our children — the least powerful of God’s people, particularly the ones who most need our help, but at the same time, the people who offer us greatest hope because they hold the future of our nation and the Church in their hands.