Strong School-Community Partnerships in Inclusive Schools Are "Part of the Fabric of the School... We Count on Them".

School–community partnerships play an essential role in successful schools, often providing supports and resources to meet staff, family, and student needs that go beyond what is typically available through school. Reciprocally, community partners benefit from their relationships with schools, including learning about schools’ inclusive culture. To better understand strong community partnerships and what fosters their development, we conducted focus groups with community partners of five schools. The first main finding presented in this article is that these schools have a variety of partners and partnerships, but all partnerships are reciprocal in that they are mutually beneficial. The second set of findings presented include the school factors that were facilitators of successful school–community partnerships: strong school leadership, an inviting school culture, educator commitment to student success, and the ability to collaborate and communicate with community partners. The community partners in many of these schools emphasized how the culture of including all students and providing all students with an excellent education profoundly influenced how they perceived disability and how they used their new knowledge in other settings. Implications for practice and future research are discussed.