About this Web site

This Web site was designed to provide school staff and technical assitance providers with tools to use with school staff, after-school program staff, community members,and other youth and adults that are working to implement a community school model.  The Web site contains meeting agendas, presentations, planning activities, and other documents that can be adapted for use in many settings.

The Community School BASICS Toolkit and this Web site is based on the Academy for Community Schools Development (ACSD) which brought together five schools over three years to design and implment community schools in San Mateo County, California.  ACSD and this toolkit were developed by the John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities at Stanford University (JGC), together with the National Technical Asssistance Center for Community Schools at Children's Aid Society, and the Center for Community School Partnerships at the University of California at Davis (CCSP).

This toolkit is not attempt to be a comprehensive look at the ACSD as we recognize that this effort was specific to a time and place.  Instead, thish toolkit draws on the resources that were used during ACSD in the belief that this compilation of agendas, tools and reflections will provide the core content fo the sessions and be useful to other sites in their planning and development of community schools.

These efforts would not have been possible without the hard work and dedication of the five schools involved:

Fair Oaks School, Hoover Magnet School, Kennedy Middle School, and Taft School in Redwood City, California and Cunha IntermediateSchool in Half Moon Bay, California.

For more on the ACSD effort you can read the story of ACSD, about ACSD's design and development, and case studies published on each schools involved.