--> High impact

Focused on discrete needs

• Specific services are provided based on the particular needs of youth (e.g. youth with poor mental health receive counseling services)

Focused on whole youth

• Youth need academic and non academic supports to reach high academic standards. Sites provide youth with an array of supports to succeed and multiple ways to access learning resources and develop new competencies.
  
  
• Recognizes that youth learn throughout their day--on their athletic teams, in their community services projects, and in less formal interactions with adults and peers--in ways that can and do improve youths' performance in school.
  
  
• Accordingly, they aim to strengthen youths' learning experience in and out of school.

Targeted for youth "at risk" or "in need"

• Services and supports are provided to certain youth considered in need of additional academic and nonacademic supports to participate successfully in school
  
  
• Programs tend to be added on to otherwise unchanged regular school programs

Focused on all youth

• Whether or not the initiative can involve all youth, the sites assume that all youth need appropriate support for learning
  
  
• Ongoing improvements in the overall school program as well as community resources are necessary to provide these supports.

Deficit-oriented

• Focused on fixing problems, meeting needs, and avoiding risk as a precondition to learning (including programs that aim to achieve goals other than learning in order to enhance learning).
  
  
• Youth are clients and recipients of services.

Strengths-based/Pro-social and developmental

• Recognizes that all youth, schools, and communities have strengths and seek to build on these while meeting youths needs
  
  
• Youth are engaged as co-constructors of solutions to their own problems and concerns.
  
  
• Building trust and shared values is essential
  
  
• The focus moves beyond the provision of services at or near a school campus and is concerned with the day-to-day interaction among youth and the various adults at a school-community site.

Generic, standardized programming

• Essentially generic programming unrelated to the community.
  
  
• Programs and/or program models developed by national headquarters or another outside source; carried out without consultation with or reference to the youth they are to benefit.

Responsive to specific youth and neighborhoods

• Programs, whether brought in from the outside or developed locally, are designed with the specific interests and needs of local youth in mind
  
  
• Flexible programming changes as the needs and interests of participating youth change.

Organization-centered/Adult-Centered

• "School-community connections" means integration or a linking of organizations
  
  
• Efforts focus on meeting the needs of adults (including parents) as a primary strategy to improve student outcomes

Youth-centered

• "School-community connections" means the experiences of youth in and out of school are connected and used to strengthen the other. "Connection" occurs at the level of the youth.
  
  
• Relationships with or social networks among adults and peers within and beyond the school are important features of these connections.

Expands access to information for various professionals who work with youth

• Provide opportunities for teachers, youth workers, and others to learn about youths' experience in their school and their various communities.
  
  
• Tends to focus on expanding the information available to classroom teachers about why their students may not be achieving

Expands funds of knowledge for youths' multiple teachers in and out of school

• Recognizes that youth have multiple teachers throughout their day each of whom brings essential and different knowledge, experiences, and expertise to bear in their relationships with youth
  
  
• Provides multiple opportunities for these teachers to learn from one another and to enhance and expand their professional practice.