On May 18, 2022, the California Department of Education announced in a press release the first round of grants for at least $3 billion dedicated to the Community Schools Partnership Program (CCSPP). This unprecedented sum of money is the beginning of a seven-year investment into the establishment and support of community schools across the state. By late May, 268 school districts across California had been awarded hundreds and thousands of dollars in grants, including L.A. Unified School District which received $44 million to support thirty-one already-established community schools and the creation of new schools (Newberry, 2022). This sum of public state money toward public education is historic, a dramatic increase from previous state budgets.

Linda Darling-Hammond, the State Board of Education President and a leading education scholar, described this monumental sum of public money as “exciting.” Darling-Hammond expressed what many longtime educational advocates know to be true, “schools in communities with high rates of poverty, homelessness, and food insecurity lack the funds to address student mental health issues, improve wellness, and support learning recovery” (California Department of Education, 2022). A 2021 report published by the Public Policy Institute of California described the persistent poverty levels that continue to impact families and young people across the state. They found that more than a third of Californians are living in or near poverty, about 6.3 million people lack basic resources, and poverty disproportionately impacts children, seniors, Latinx communities, and less-educated adults (Bohn et al., 2021). The CCSPP approach aims to address these longstanding inequities that have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic by utilizing Community Schooling to support the whole child. This approach is supported by four empirically proven pillars that are “mediating factors through which schools achieve good outcomes for students” (Maier et al., 2018). The four pillars are:

  1. 1.

    Integrated student supports: Embedding social services into schools, including social-emotional learning, trauma-informed care, and restorative justice practices.

  2. 2.

    Expanded learning time and opportunities: Including afterschool, weekend, and summer programs for additional academic and enrichment activities.

  3. 3.

    Family and community engagement: Bringing parents and community stakeholders into the schools to support school-based decision-making and educational opportunities for adult learners.

  4. 4.

    Collaborative leadership and practice: Implementing a culture of lateral leadership and learning for school-based staff that democratizes power and decision-making, including a community-school coordinator who manages the work between schools and community partners.

These pillars of Community Schools represent the bedrock of a democratic approach to education and inject participatory voice, engagement, and power-sharing into American public schools that have traditionally limited and oppressed especially students from historically marginalized groups. The state of California is now in the national vanguard, reigniting the historical approach of Community Schools in twenty-first-century America.

California can tap into the existing Community School institutional memory and knowledge already established within the state. In 2017, the Los Angeles Unified Board of Education unanimously agreed to the Community Schools Initiative (CSI), after a coalition of parents, educators, and community members (known as ROSLAFootnote 1) demanded greater voice in public schooling (Saunders et al., 2021). This bold move promised to create schools as hubs for the community and meet young people and their families where they are in a culturally responsive, restorative, and holistic way.

As a doctoral candidate at UCLA, I had an opportunity to visit an established Community School in the fall of 2022 in Southern California. My fieldnotes and experiences there underscore the way the four pillars were enacted and implemented into the school’s governance, culture, and relationships.

Pillar 1: Integrated Student Supports

Arriving on campus I am surrounded by art—welcome signs in English, Spanish, and Korean, mirroring the languages most students speak at home and in the broader community. A massive public art mural covering every inch of an entire 100 ft wall reads “I see you. I am you. We are one.” I imagine seeing that every day and what that reminder might mean for each student, staff, and community member, walking through these doors. Entering the front office, I met a secretary on the phone speaking in Spanish with a binder out in front of her that reads “Legal Services.” Across the hallway, a quick glance over my left shoulder, there’s an on-campus immigration legal clinic for families, the first in the country, to support students and their families with visas and asylum applications. There’s a big sign out front “Immigration Family Legal Clinic” reprinted in Spanish and Korean, too. The feeling is clear: all are welcome.

The law clinic supports the school community (students, teachers, parents) and also the broader community in which the school is situated, thereby fulfilling the first pillar of the Community School model. The clinic opened on the heels of Donald Trump’s presidential election as a reaction to a call from the broader community, and since its inception it has provided hundreds of individuals with legal counseling and support. Additionally, the clinic has organized community education events on workers’ rights, and the basics of U.S. immigration law. This school, while ultimately dedicated to student learning, understands that meeting the needs of young people is broader than just what occurs in a traditional classroom setting. It includes supporting students and their families’ immigration status and providing legal assistance when necessary. The family law clinic is not only a physical manifestation of integrated student supports, but a call-and-response from the community’s needs.

Pillar 2: Expanded Learning Time and Opportunities

Partnerships, partnerships, partnerships. I heard that word thrown around by every member of the school community from students to teachers to administrators. This school relies on its partnerships in order to provide additional learning and enrichment opportunities to students and families. The students who guided me on a tour around campus shared the numerous and varied activities that they had participated in since coming to this school.

I got to spend a weekend at UCLA, that was so great, to be at a real university for the weekend. Even though it’s not far from here, it feels like another world, so it was great to spend time there.

The partnership between this school and university partners is unique to the Community School approach. It offers opportunities for students to engage on university campuses, and it provides university students like myself an avenue to engage at the school and support the work of teaching and learning. The reciprocal relationship offers tangible opportunities for all stakeholders to have enriching and engaging relationships. The school also provides additional college workshops both from school counselors and third-party intermediary non-profit organizations. As one school partnership staff member shared with me, “the more opportunities and partnerships the better, so we can meet as many students’ needs as possible.” When I asked her how she managed the many afterschool and extra-curricular opportunities, she smiled knowingly, “it depends on a strong communicative relationship.” Other students shared with me how they attended college classes, played basketball, and accessed mental health therapy through the partnerships and opportunities at this school—encapsulating and bridging the first two pillars together and reinforcing these pillars are not static, but dynamic and overlapping.

Pillar 3: Family and Community Engagement

Ledya Garcia, the former UCLA Community School principal in Koreatown in Los Angeles, and the new Associate Director for Professional Learning for UCLA’s Center for Community Schooling, has described how Community Schools work differently: “We’ve known some students since Kindergarten; we have a history with their family and siblings, when they hit a bump in the road, we respond differently” (Fensterwald, 2022). Family and community engagement is not just a filler sentence that Community Schools spout out for recruitment or advertising purposes. Rather, the school that I visited embodies it. Walking around the campus, I ran into parents of all different ethnic-racial and age backgrounds who volunteer or are paid for their work on campus whether it’s handing out additional food during lunch time or providing language translations. Parents are participating in their children’s school life in real and physically present-ways. As a staff member shared “if parents come in looking for help, they’ll get help.”

Located in the middle of the campus, there is a parent center, which supports parents in a wide range of activities and in their home languages (occasionally translated by other peer parents). The center meets with parents one-on-one, offers trainings and workshops throughout the year often developed and implemented by parent representatives, and the principal holds monthly parent gatherings to share a wide range of information with families often in multiple languages.

Pillar 4: Collaborative Leadership and Practice

On the most structural level, the Community School I visited is guided by a decision-making council comprised of teachers, students, parents, academics, and community partners that centers the school’s vision, selects and annually evaluates leadership, and approves the yearly budget. However, the collaborative leadership and practice was even more visible in the moment-to-moment practices of the school. During my visit, all stakeholders were given an equal voice to describe the school. No one school representative held the mic or dominated the soapbox. The relationships and shared leadership across power differentials were evident.

A sophomore at the school told me, “I love the teachers at this school. They actually try hard to have relationships with us. They are funny, make jokes, and have fun with us.” A junior who had been attending this school since kindergarten shared, “I see my 1st grade teacher all the time. It’s fun, plus my cousin just had her in class, too. My English teacher I liked a lot because even though she didn’t have perfect Spanish, it didn’t matter because she tried. Plus, she always had visuals and PowerPoints in English and Spanish to help the students who are learning and lots of pretty designs. She was really good at relating the content in class to us.”

Students, teachers, staff, and administrators repeated that relationships were at the core of their work to help students succeed. All of the services and opportunities at the school were made possible by the many hats each school community member wore, and each was in service of students’ learning. As one support staff member shared, “community schools can be anything the community needs it to be, if you have people who want to be everything.” Her vision for Community Schools relies on investment from people who are supported financially to continue this hard but necessary work. The school visit represents the possibility of what the Community School public investment could mean for the future of California and democratically run schools.

Community Schools, as John Rogers, a professor of education at UCLA, argues, can be places where “schools can unearth and build the full capabilities of all young people so that they can collectively make their community better. It links young people and community organizations in a web of trust and solidarity. And it supports the development of youth as empowered civic agents able to use tools of inquiry, deliberation, and communication to address the consequential problems of our times” (Rogers, 2022). Importantly, Rogers also notes that Community Schools’ popularity ebbs and flows during times of social and political upheaval (Camera, 2021). In our current moment in the United States—defined by a seemingly never-ending pandemic, hyper political polarization, and a democracy quite literally under threat—Community Schools are desperately needed. They can bring people together, particularly young people and their communities, to transform society.

Moving Forward

All eyes will be on California as CCSPP launches year one of this seven-year initiative. As the state noted in their press release, CCSPP is “the first statewide initiative to provide funding, support, and standardization of the program through common guiding pillars” (referencing the Community School pillars listed above).

Importantly, California’s language presents a cause for concern. The use of the term “standardization” seems oxymoronic given the guiding tenets of Community Schools. As the UCLA Center for Community Schooling 2021 teacher-authored report writes, Community Schools are “grounded in the belief that schools belong to students, families, teachers and school staff, Community Schools aims to elevate the voices of the community…” (ibid.). It’s hard to imagine the state successfully standardizing Community Schools’ approach when so much of their strength is rooted in the unique, complex, and dynamic neighborhoods in which they exist. Each school shapes—and is shaped by—its community. This push for standardization raises questions like: How does the push for standardization fit together with this new rejuvenated emphasis on democratic local control?

California’s investment in CCSPP may offer an opportunity to study this tension. At the start of the grant, 286 school districts, county offices of education, and charter schools will receive grants, and UCLA’s Center for Community Schooling, alongside the Alameda County of Education, Californians for Justice—an education non-profit; and the National Education Association—the teachers’ union, will collaborate as a “Lead Technical Assistance Center” to support the implementation of Community School approaches across the state. Technical assistance, as one of the leaders for this new hub told me anonymously, feels fraught. The center is faced with daunting tasks like budgets and timelines, while simultaneously needing to educate those unfamiliar with Community Schools. She shared, “it’s more about cultural change, political and economic change, and recognizing that the work needs to stay at the ground and school level, and that’s what we hope to help do.” Ultimately, while the pillars offer a guiding framework for Community Schools, they require high quality implementation. The pillars cannot just be a checklist for standardization efforts. Community Schools, as any teacher, administrator, student, or community member will tell you, requires centering deep relationships.

CCSPP has exciting potential and provides significant resources to foster collective agency through democratic approaches of Community Schools. Community Schools, by nature of their design, are meant to transform while simultaneously foregrounding students, schools, and communities’ voices and needs. Importantly, transformation takes times. As teachers from Community Schools remind us: “the current focus on Community Schools presents an important opportunity to re-center attention on how Community Schools influence the core instructional practices and relationships within schools” (Saunders et al., 2021). This new investment in Community Schools represents a beacon of transformation that centers young people and their families, and positions schools as places of change, resistance, and hope.