Community Schools: Building Local Resilience, Strengthening Community Relationships, and Helping Students Thrive

At this moment, public education is under more threat than it has faced in recent decades. In response, many are mobilizing to protect students and the education systems that serve them. Lawsuits and grassroots organizing are challenging the President’s executive orders. Education funders are working to listen, respond to needs, and move money to grantees faster to ensure continuity of work. These strategies to minimize damage and preserve existing education systems are essential. Without them, more students are likely to be endangered as the systems that support them are destroyed. 

While necessary, harm reduction and preservation of the status quo are not, by themselves, adequate responses. While those fights continue, we must also come together to begin building new structures of public education. What might we build together now that can serve as a welcome foundation for efforts to rebuild and renew in the future? How might we do that in ways that strengthen relationships and build resilience?

One answer can be found in the resurgence of a time-tested idea for improving public schools: community schools. The concept has had multiple names over time, and waves of interest in community schools have developed and advanced the idea that schools should be places that offer integrated support to students and families, where learning opportunities are expanded beyond the traditional school day and incorporate the resources of the surrounding community, and where families and community members are engaged in collaborative leadership in support of student learning.

Right now, efforts to establish community schools are happening in Boston, Lynn, Salem, and other communities across Massachusetts and the country. Here are some reasons why this strategy deserves attention and support right now:

• Community schools help students thrive: New York City’s Community Schools Initiative, begun in 2014, has shown promising results in its evaluations — boosting academic achievement, reducing chronic absenteeism and disciplinary incidents, and improving graduation rates (NYC Public Schools InfoHub). 
• Community schools strengthen community relationships: By connecting families, neighbors, local businesses, and young people through the work of educating our youth, community schools forge relationships built on mutual trust and support. Root Cause’s own evaluation of the Community Hub Schools initiative in Boston has shown increased partnerships and stronger connections across participating school communities.
• Community schools build local resilience: Members in each school community take time to identify their strengths and needs, and work together to make sure each student, family, and community member has what they need to flourish. By weaving connections across the neighborhood around the school, that neighborhood can become an engine of economic mobility. Another name for this process is “school centered neighborhood development” – MassINC offers a helpful playbook for making it happen. 

Perhaps the most important reason to invest in community schools in today’s context: Community Schools are built on hope. Education is a fundamentally optimistic endeavor. When a community circles together to invest in its children and their futures, it centers hope by taking short-term actions with planned long-term outcomes. Community schools offer us an opportunity to approach hope as an active discipline, by forging connections with our neighbors and taking concrete steps to build a better world for our children and for each other.