School-Community Partnerships in Rural Schools: Leadership, Renewal, and a Sense of Place

This article presents a school-community partnership school renewal model that could help rural school communities to enhance their educational processes is presented. This model capitalizes on the sense of place of a community and other distinctive aspects of rural school communities. It relies on the development of six types of family-school-community connections: social capital, sense of place, parental involvement, church ties, social-business-agency relations, and community as a curricular resource. Each of these connections and the implications of this school-community partnership model of school renewal for educational leadership are discussed.