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 use prevention trial among youth at continuation high schools in California. First, we generated a list o f 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 rati ngs. We generated six categories of activities from the results of the se two studies. These studies reveal a means to determine activities l ikely to be completed by this school System and a means to limit the v ariability of activities which could be manipulated in an experimental trial involving a school-as-community component.