Community Assignment: The Most Important Roles Of School Social Work

Community Assignment 2

The most valuable assets of communities are their members, because “no matter how poor or frightened or lacking in immediate power, each community has resources it can use to make significant improvement, including the most important resource, people” (Homan, 2016, p. 154). School social workers, by acting as liaisons between school and community, play an important role in obtaining and coordinating community resources to meet students ' needs and simultaneously offer professional assistance to parents and teachers. Moreover, because school social workers are familiar with the functioning of students and school’s environments, they also serve as invaluable resources for the institution of education (Garza & Landeck,

1). Furthermore, as emphasized by Bye, Shepard, Partridge, and Alvarez (2009), school social workers “assist students by addressing problems that interfere with students’ ability to function and make academic progress in school” (p. 97). Finally, they can also obtain grants and community partners to help their school districts or to contribute funds for specific programs.

In order to promote a climate for change, school social workers need not only to “respond to the needs of the education system and follow changes in policies at the state and national levels” (Peckover, Vasquez, Van Housen, Saunders, & Allen, 2013, p. 9), but also need to be aware of ethnic and racial barriers within school system. For example, research has shown that Mexican American adolescents constitute the largest and fastest growing subgroup of Latinos in the United States, but they “lag behind in educational and occupational attainment” (Updegraff et al., 2014, p.