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Yesterday I wrote about Mark Schneider’s belief that to significantly raise student achievement in this nation, we need to “shock” the system. Today, I learned about a partnership aiming to do just that in a rural West Virginia district.

West Virginia Governor Earl Ray Tomblin, State Board of Education Vice President Gayle Manchin and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) have announced Reconnecting McDowell, a public-private partnership with more than 40 partners aimed at enhancing educational opportunity for children in McDowell County, a district that has ranked lowest in the state in academic performance for most of the past decade. 

As a community, McDowell County faces a number of challenges in addition to a low-performing educational system. According to the Washington Post, while historically the area has produced the most coal in the state, with the collapse of the coal and steel industries in the 1960s, the unemployment rate has risen dramatically. Nearly 80% of children in the school district live in poverty; 72% live in a household without gainful employment. The area has a high incarceration rate. It also has a large number of residents struggling with addition, and it leads the nation in overdose deaths from prescription medications. As one area lawyer is quoted in the Post article, “People use drugs as an escape, to escape reality…The folks here don’t have any perception of the future.”

While educational improvement is to be the centerpiece of this new partnership, the initiative’s leaders recognize that working with schools alone will likely not lead to the results this community seeks. So while the initiative will work in schools to develop a well-rounded curriculum for academic and social development, strengthen school literacy programs, improve professional development and training programs for teachers, and expand broadband access to allow students to take advantage of digital learning opportunities (among its possible projects), it will also seek to provide new services to the broader community. Possible plans include intensive preparation for pre-kindergartners, better access to health care, drug prevention and treatment programs, and more recreational activities open to the community. 

To be sure, this isn’t the first time that those interested in improving educational outcomes have looked beyond the school. In Syracuse, Say Yes to Education is showing promising results to a comprehensive transformation agenda. The Harlem Children’s Zone has been doing this type of work since the 1990s. Some districts do similar work under the banner of the community schools movement. And the Obama administration supports the concept at the federal level with its Promise Neighborhoods grant program. 

But the media coverage of this particular partnership is encouraging. While this type of work has been going on relatively quietly in a number of communities for decades, it is time that it is brought to the forefront of national education conversation. This type of community orientation may be just the shock that a system needs to truly change outcomes for disadvantaged students.