The Six Priorities: How to Find the Resources Your School Community Needs

In this provocative and timely book, Luis Eladio Torres challenges a common assumption: that education is the "first priority" for families, including those who are raising their children in low-income, high-need communities. Instead, he argues that these families must confront daunting challenges in five other areas—food, shelter, safety, health, and access to technology—before they can focus on their children's education.

To make his case, Torres draws on his experience as the award-winning principal of an elementary school in the Bronx and as a leader in New York City's community schools network. A community school focuses on educating the whole child, supporting families, and extending its reach into the larger community—both by tapping into resources the community can offer and by providing a range of social and health services to that community.

The Six Priorities: How to Find the Resources Your School Community Needs demonstrates how leaders in challenging education environments can improve their schools through a "community-matching process" that consists of four steps:

1. Identifying the gaps between what is available and what is necessary for a school and its community to function well
2. Specifying needs, including prioritizing and distinguishing needs from wants.
3. Telling your story, as a way to gain support for the effort to close the gap and address the needs.
4. Establishing strategic partnerships with individuals, organizations, and agencies that can provide resources and expertise.

To help you implement the process in your own school, this insightful guide includes a downloadable community-matching worksheet.

The goals of this process are clear: to reduce the shocking inequities between impoverished communities and their wealthier counterparts; to help disadvantaged students succeed; and, ultimately, to steer them toward productive lives beyond the classroom. The need has never been greater.

Luis Eladio Torres, president of the New York City Elementary School Principals Association, has been a principal in New York City for over 18 years. After serving in the U.S. Navy for 10 years, Torres earned a bachelor's degree in psychology from City College, a master's degree in education from Mercy College, and an advanced degree in administration from Hunter College. Torres then entered the NYC Leadership Academy, after which he was given the responsibility of leading C.S. 55. Torres and his team turned C.S. 55—once the lowest-performing school in New York City, located in the Morrisania housing projects in the Bronx—into a model school. Torres has raised millions of dollars for C.S. 55 and surrounding schools, acting as his school's spokesperson, publicist, and cheerleader.