ON THE RISE:
Cincinnati's Community Learning Centers
Community Schools are the kind of public schools that families want and children need: coordinated, inclusive, comprehensive, adaptive, responsive, and above all else, equitable. In Cincinnati, Community Schools are called "Community Learning Centers" and this six-part series from Media Sutra and The Partnership for the Future of Learning takes a deep dive into how these schools are working and their impact on their communities.
Episode 1: History of Cincinnati Community Learning Centers
In 2001, Cincinnati passed a school board policy to turn all of their schools into Community Schools, called Community Learning Centers in Ohio. Cincinnati shows that Community Learning Centers can help revitalize a neighborhood by combining community power with the resources that children need to thrive.
Episode 2: Community Engagement
Episode 3: Community Development
Episode 4: Pathways for All
On the day after the election in 2016, students of color and immigrant students felt too targeted and afraid to come to school in Cincinnati. The classrooms felt empty. Fortunately, Cincinnati’s Community Schools, called Community Learning Centers in Ohio, were set up to help. By partnering with local businesses and services, parents could connect with legal assistance, which eased students’ minds and made it possible for them to be in class.
Episode 5: Teaching Partnerships
Drama and ELA teacher, Katie Fleihman, uses her past experiences and struggles as a student to help her students overcome their own challenges. She explains, “You need to bring outside pieces of the world in." Cincinnati’s first poet laureate, Pauletta Hansel, was also brought in to forge connections with students around writing as a way to explore their identities and interests. Students like James Sweet and Lizziey Fahey, who once disliked poetry have become poets themselves, or have branched into other forms of written expression
These Community Learning Center partnerships not only create the conditions necessary for learning, but they can also provide opportunities for engaging experiential learning by connecting community experts from a variety of areas with the classroom.
Episode 6: Rebranding LPH Together
A partnership between a school, a neighborhood, and a local business in Cincinnati -- this film shows how students from a school in Lower Price Hill worked with Nehemiah Manufacturing Company to take the reins and rebrand their own neighborhood with the support of its community members. Cynthia Ford shares how the community is in the process of growth and transformation for the better.
Each aspect of the community—parents, teachers, students, residents, the CLCI, and the local businesses providing opportunities—come together to make the Community Learning Centers the unique and successful environments that they are where students can acquire real world skills such as marketing and neighborhood development as part of their classroom learning experience.