A Note on Community Schools

by Milbrey McLaughlin

The Community Schools BASICS toolkit (Building, Assessing, Sustaining, and Improving Community Schools) brings together over ten years of knowledge from working in partnership with schools and experts in the community school field to develop and support community schools.  John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities (JGC) at Stanford University, with help from our partners, has documented the process and the resources gathered in this toolkit with the hope that others can learn from our work and that youth in other communities will benefit from it.

At the heart of the work of community schools is the ambitious goal of uniting the most important influences in children’s lives – school, families and communities – to create a web of support that nurtures their development.  Community schools support student success by focusing on the broad community context in which learning and social development happens. Young people who grow up in poverty confront the same developmental tasks as do more advantaged American youth.  They must acquire the social skills, personal attitudes and intellectual competencies that will carry them to successful adulthood.  But too many poor and low income youth must accomplish these goals in the context of inadequate medical care, poor nutrition, family dysfunction, unsafe neighborhoods and few opportunities for learning and development in their out-of-school time. While all youth benefit from schools that are an active part of thriving communities, it is the over 13 million American youth living in poverty for which community schools can make an essential difference.

Each partner in our project brought exceptional strengths and commitment to the collaboration that resulted in this Community School BASICS toolkit.  Our five partner schools have been extraordinary in their willingness to share the challenges they faced as they worked to become a community school.  Our partners in city and county agencies, and in community-based organizations have been tireless in their efforts to understand and respond to  the complexities that schools faced as they struggled to use resources in new ways, create new relationships and new ways of ‘doing school.’ The Technical Assistance Center for Community Schools at Children’s Aid Society in New York City (NTACCS) has worked with countless school sites around the country to implement community school models; their experience, perspective and collegiality provided strong and generous guidance along every step of our schools’ journey to becoming community schools.  The Center for Community School Partnerships at the University of California Davis brought knowledge of the California context and expertise in planning for success. JGC is proud to have served as a sponsor, facilitator, and convener in this effort.

To create this toolkit we have taken a moment to reflect back on all that occurred—the successes as well as the short falls-- between 2003 and 2006 when these partners came together in an initiative called the Academy for Community School Development (ACSD).  We invite you to read about this work, try some of the things we tried, and use our learning to innovate on behalf of youth in your own schools and communities.