BUILDING FOR SCHOOL AND COMMUNITY - Kennedy Bibliothek

to be provided. In contrast to Mack where a sizable community facility
is not used to its full extent, the Bryant Neighborhood Steering Committee
had to lease one of the empty houses in the neighbourhood to accommodate
offices and social services. The school does not provide enough space
to accommodate these functions. Another difference is a supporting grant
of $15 000 from the city to pay for a Bryant community co-ordinator, a
youth worker, consultants, space, supplies and equipment.
f) Examples of Further Developments
i) Teaching - Learning Communities
174. An interesting and inexpensive model of enriching the schools' human
resources is a city-wide program which originated six years ago and is
known as the Retired Senior Volunteer Program, successfully re-organised
and broadened during the past two years. Now called Teaching-Learning
Communities, it links senior citizens' experiences and pupils' needs in
the field of arts and crafts. Ann Arbor, as a university city, chronically
short of grandparents, calls its senior citizens involved in this
program,"grandpersons", and has set up 246 projects involving 150 grandpersons
in 8 schools. About 100 students per week are served by this
program in which one actually has a hard time distinguishing who is serving
whom. Does the grandperson help the pupil or is it the other way around,
or both ways?
175. The program is inexpensive to operate and, therefore, of great interest
to other communities. One portion of its funds has been allocated
to evaluate, document and determine accurately the differences between
schools in their implementation of the teaching-learning communities concept.
Such differences do, indeed, exist and are partly due to such
variables as the school principal, art teacher, physical plant, and health,
age and skills of the grandperson volunteers.
ii) Community High School
176. Another example of how old school structures can be used for new programs
is the old Fritz Elementary School, built in 1922. With 16 classrooms
and about 450 pupils, it served as an elementary school until the
late 60's when it was replaced by new facilities in adjacent areas and
became a temporary administrative building for the Board of Education and
Central Resource Center. In 1973 when new administrative facilities had
been built, it was given over to Community High School - CHS (also with
about 450 pupils), a "parkway" type school which provides an educational
alternative for Ann Arbor's high school population. Dedicated to individualised
instruction and the use of community resources as the basis
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