School-as-community activity selection at continuation high schools

This paper describes two studies which together provide an example of an empirically based "school-as-community" development process used in a large-scale school-based drug prevention trial among youth at continuation high schools in California. First, we generated a list of schools' current community involvement from 96 school personnel and 144 students from 20 continuation high schools. Second, we reduced the number of activities indicated, with some discussion, to a list of 12 populars. Then, we administered this list to a total of 388 students from six continuation high schools who provided perceived quality ratings. We generated six categories of activities from the results of these two studies. These studies reveal a means to determine activities likely to be completed by this school system and a means to limit the variability of activities which could be manipulated in an experimental trial involving a school-as-community component.