Healthy Integrated Public Schools

If Every Child Were My Child - Building Healthy Integrated Public Schools
HIC Richmond is committed to a multi-year initiative to facilitate conversations in the metropolitan community about how to build healthy integrated public schools. HIC is working to forge a new level of collaboration among students, educators, parents, employers and community organizations, within and across the schools and school districts. HIC seeks to help the community ask itself the following questions:

• What choices are we making to provide the best development for our children?
• What factors are influencing our choices?
• How do divisions of race, economics and jurisdiction impact our children and the future of metropolitan Richmond?

Richmond public schools, like our neighborhoods, are largely segregated by race and income. Yet, decades of study have shown that healthy integrated learning environments significantly improve educational, economic and social outcomes - for all students.

The roots cause of our persistent separation appears to be a lack of trust across racial, economic and other differences, and betwenn citizens and their educational institutions. For the past five years, Hope in the Cities, together with its partner Richmond Hill, an ecumenical retreat center, has promoted honest conversation to build trust and create healthy integrated public schools (HIP Schools).

Today HIC trustbuilders are helping Richmond Public Schools create HIP Schools in three important ways:

1. Supporting the Micah Initiative, a partnership among over 75 faith communities and 25 RPS elementary schools.

2. Facilitating honest conversation among parents and educators at public and private schools in metropolitan Richmond.

HIC is now offering a series of faciliated school conversations through which parents and educators a) share their hopes andf concerns at the opening of school each Fall, b) asses their HIP School progress in the Winter, and c) in the Spring, invite others in the neighborhood to join their school community the following Fall.

3. Accompanying School Board members and adminstrators as they become an effective and governance team and trustbuilders in the wider community.

HIC trustbuilders are working with RPS leaders to help them design effective Board governance processes and public involvement processes through which our diverse community participates in creating HIP Schools.

Explore how you can become a HIP School trustbuilder. Contact the Hope in the Cities office.

Learn more about the project- Download the 2006 report
Download handout
Download summary handout
Download Jon Powell Power Point on Richmond school integration