Schools have always been 'in' the center of communities, but in recent years, with the many additional demands and expectations placed on them, some schools have shifted their focus to in fact become 'community centers' in their own right.

Elementary schools in particular have partnered with doctors, mental health, Children and Family Services, child-care providers, and local service organizations to provide the many needs and enrichment opportunities that often go unanswered for today's children.

In my own experience, I saw the impact of what bringing pediatricians and mental health/social workers into the school on a regular basis did for our students and their families. In a rural setting in a rural county, a trip to the pediatrician from "my neck of the woods" was often a 40-50 mile round trip, and to see a specialist in the next county over could be over 100 miles. By partnering with the local pediatrics group, our students could be seen by a physician's assistant right at the school, and prescriptions were called into the local pharmacy in the next town over. We used the same system for mental health workers/social workers from the county's Human Services division. Parents were much more comfortable in the school setting where they were comfortable to tackle issues of abuse, homelessness, custody with a partner on their side.  Our school also hosted a food-bank and clothes closet supported by local churches and service organizations that families were free to "shop" at without having to travel directly to these organizations. GED classes, adult education courses, and family fitness activities were also offered at the school after school hours. In effect, we became the 'one-stop-shop' for families in our isolated community.

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is a very simple diagram and, when I first learned about it, I thought it was just another stupid theory that I had to memorize.

Oh boy, was I wrong.

I think the future of schools lies in this very pyramid (yes, including the "WiFi" addition to the bottom).

What Maslow says in a nutshell is that physiological, safety, "love and belonging" and self-esteem needs must be met before any substantive learning can take place. If one comes from the 10th richest county in the United States, chances are one probably will not be affected by the bottom blocks (food, water, shelter, safety, etc.), although one never knows...

Here's where schools need to step in! Children who are missing these basic necessities in their lives can be provided them at school. For example:

• A school breakfast program, coupled with a normal school lunch (and possibly even a late lunch after school) would fix a large portion of their food needs.
  
• Extra-curricular activities and sports are a must, especially as many parents work from 9am to 5pm (or later) and have difficulty finding and paying for someone to watch their children. Activities also keep kids out of trouble, allow students to explore topics that interest them, and create friendships so the more activities the better!
  
• A medical and dental service, and not necessarily only for its students! Some schools have a nurse full time and have a doctor come and do check-ups once or twice a week, for both students and families.
  
• Student Resource Officers are police officers from the community who either visit or work in schools during regular (and/or afterschool) hours. SROs are common in many schools and serve a crucial community-outreach role necessary for students to feel safe and have someone they can talk to specifically about safety issues.

What I'm trying to say is that it's possible and necessary for schools to become community centers, pulling multiple cultures and backgrounds of students together in order to care for their neighborhoods, towns and/or cities. Once we provide for a student and a family's physical well-being, real progress in educating and uplifting individuals and communities can commence!

First I want to give you a quote, then two pictures.

Has anything really changed? The picture on the left is from a school in 1937, the one on the right is from 2012. Besides the clothes and the kids, what has changed?? The rooms are still square, the desks are still in rows, the walls have the same awful posters on them, and the kids do more or less the same activities!

We need to innovate our school systems. To quote NJ Governor Chris Christie: "If my children are living under the same school calendar that I lived under, by definition, that school calendar is antiquated." But it's not just the school calendar!

That quote? Oh yeah, it's from an article in a teacher's magazine. From 1927.

In 1991, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi wrote a book called The Knowledge-Creating Company: How Japanese
Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation. Now you might be thinking who cares? It's a book about companies and economics, just another boring edition of The Idiot's Guide to Making Loads of Money or something like that. But you'd be wrong and, in fact, you would have missed out on a brilliant little theory they produced called the spiral of knowledge. You see in this book, Nonaka and Takeuchi proposed that there were two different types of knowledge, tacit and explicit. 

Explicit knowledge is “easy to articulate and express formally” (Paavola, Lipponen, and Hakkarainen 2004, p. 559)
Tacit knowledge is “embedded in individual experience” and involves “personal belief, perspective, and the value system” (Nonaka and Takeuchi 1995, p. viii)

Okay great, so now we know where innovation comes from. So what?

Well actually we go back to the title of the book, you know the one we said sounded like the Idiot's Guide to Fame and Fortune? Because actually it's very important. I'll write it again, with the important parts in bold:
The Knowledge-Creating Company: How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation
The fact is that Nonaka and Takeuchi wrote a book explaining how companies can foster innovation, something many people consider the key to business success.