What is a school? Before the COVID-19 pandemic, most would have answered this question without much hesitation as a physical place — a set of buildings a where kids and teachers meet for classes, then go home. This answer was never quite right, was it?

An increasing number of communities are taking a broad view of the roles that a school can play in a community. This idea has a long history, often described as the community schools movement. The general idea is that when schools coordinate the services of the education system with services from other organizations and agencies, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. This video from Los Angeles County Office of Education explains the idea:

The pandemic, Gavin Newsom and community schools

The state budget for 2022-23 reflects progress on a ten-year plan for community schools advanced by California Governor Gavin Newsom. It's by far the largest investment ever envisioned for this purpose: $3 billion over ten years. Reporting for EdSource, John Fensterwald described the plan as "a massive undertaking to convert several thousand schools in low-income neighborhoods into centers of community life and providers of vital services for families as well as students."

Governor Newsom has been a longtime supporter of community schools — in San Francisco, where he was mayor, substantial funding for community schools is included in the city budget.

History of community schools

Let's back up a little. The idea that schools must contend with the non-academic factors in students' lives is not new. A community school is a strategy for organizing support from many sources to address student and community needs. The heart of this strategy is to coordinate efforts among agencies that normally are not in the business of working together. The agencies are separately managed and separately funded. The proposal from Governor Newsom aims to coax these separate organizations into communication and alignment.

Four Pillars of Community Schools: Click to view the infographic from the Learning Policy Institute.

Community schools can be traced to the settlement house movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, which began in the US with the famous Hull House in Chicago founded by Jane Adams.

During the twentieth century when local communities were authorized to raise their own taxes to fund their local schools, some California public schools could afford a wide variety of support services, including nurses, social workers, assistant principals, counselors, art teachers, physical educators and other professionals. After Prop. 13 passed, tax revenue eroded even in the best-off school districts. Support positions began to disappear. Communities looked to other agencies for support.

In the 1980’s education leaders began to talk in earnest about serving the whole child, training teachers and administrators to recognize students’ non-academic needs. The terms wraparound services and case management began to be used.

Not all programs survive.

The state legislature enacted the California Healthy Start Support Services For Children Act in 1991, a year of recovery from economic recession. Under this program, school districts competed for flexible grants to provide support services for students. Many Healthy Start districts expanded after-school programs to include support programs, counseling, tutoring and family services. These grants followed the classic structure of pilot program funding — three years of public funding, with the hope that successful programs would attract outside funding, or that school districts would allocate funds to continue them.

The program didn't survive. As schools struggled to keep their counselors, nurses and after-school programs, as well as to keep up with increased regular costs including teacher compensation, there wasn't enough money to go around. The Healthy Start program met its demise in the market bust of the early 2000s.

Expanded learning

Newsom's support for community schools in California has echoes elsewhere. Community schools enjoyed federal support under the Obama administration's Promise Neighborhoods initiative, a grant program that supported cities in replicating a program that proved successful in the Harlem neighborhood of New York. The program was defunded under the Trump administration, but restored and expanded in the Biden administration.

For schools to do more than educate kids in class, it makes sense to have a vision that extends beyond the school day. After-school strategies for learning are often called expanded learning, as described in Ed100 Lesson 4.7. In the recovery from the pandemic, community support for expanded learning was a key budget priority for both the Newsom administration and the Biden administration. The Governor's 2022-23 budget proposed $3.4 billion in support for expanded learning, an investment even larger than the $3 billion to establish community schools.

Designs for after-school and expanded learning programs have been strongly influenced by successful examples that blend the two concepts. One of the most acclaimed is the Harlem Children’s Zone in New York City. This video from Edutopia about New York's Children's Aid Society helps to show some of the possibilities.

Learn more

A well-run community school doesn’t just happen. Community school leaders have identified best practices, incorporated into the State Board of Education’s frameworks to assist schools in implementing the community school model.

Learn more about community schools in this post on the Ed100 blog. For an example of a community school in action, read the post How to Turn Around a Middle School

The next lesson addresses one of the most important factors driving a school's success or failure: leadership.

Updated July 2017, Aug 2018, Dec 2018, Feb 2020, Feb 2022.