Can you point me to a tool for measuring the performance of city-schools interagency collaborations? Thank you.
Thanks for using the Community Tool Box. Many assessments of collaborations are customized to ask questions relevant to the collaborating agencies in areas such as funding, diagnoses (in the case of schools perhaps Individualized Educational Plans). It is not clear if you are interested in assessing only schools interacting with each other or other agencies with schools. Our suggestion is to begin by writing a definition of what a successful interagency collaboration is, then identify what tangible resources are involved in the collaboration (financial, physical, services) and who distributes and uses the resources (e.g., students, parents, teachers, school staff, principals). You may want each organization involved in the collaboration to develop a few questions. Then, using interviews or focus groups ask service providers and those using the services. A logic model can help guide questions that can be counted/outputs (e.g., effective collaboration would result in a reduction of re-telling one's story to multiple agencies.
Here are some additional resources we hope are helpful:
Community School Partnership Assessment: http://www.communityschools.org/assets/1/AssetManager/csassessment.pdf
http://navnetnl.ca/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/better-at-working-together-part-1-literature-review.pdf