This guide is designed to help community members have productive conversations about how schools and communities can work together to meet the challenge of educating youth in today's society. The foreword presents a rationale for community discussions regarding improving education, and the introduction highlights new challenges facing schools. The next four sections are guides to four discussion sessions devoted to the different aspects of educating youth and the community's role in improving educational opportunities available to youth. The following topics are covered in the session guides: ways schools have affected individual community members' lives and the community as a whole; character traits and daily living, basic, and job skills needed by graduates; issues in education (ways of meeting all students' needs, making schools safer, dealing with racial and ethnic diversity, and providing a quality education with limited resources); and things individual community members and neighborhoods can do to improve education and ways schools and communities/community organizations can connect with one another. Concluding the guide is a list of eight ground rules for conducting useful discussions. (MN)