How Communities Build Stronger Schools

If it takes a village to raise a child, Anne Wescott Dodd and Jean L. Konzal feel that it takes a community to make a school. Not content with the idea of a school being contained within four walls and existing only for a few hours every day, Dodd and Konzal know that a school which looks after the complete child exists far beyond its four walls and for the whole 24 hours in each day. They present a radical democratic vision of the public school where everyone not just students, teachers and parents plays a part in shaping our children and, consequently, our future.

ANNE WESCOTT DODD is the Chair of the Education Department at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. For fifiteen years she taught English, Social Studies, and Conversational French at two junior high schools in California and English at four senior high schools in Maine. She is the co-editor of the Journal of Maine Education, which has won several national awards for excellence.

JEAN L. KONZAL is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Elementary and Early Childhood Education at the College of New Jersey in Ewing, New Jersey. She has worked as a teacher, a reading specialist, and a state consultant on issues of educational reform in both urban and rural settings.