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As 2022 begins, educators, students, families and communities continue to navigate a state of prolonged and volatile crisis. The persistent spread of Covid-19 has compounded the challenge of ensuring safe and healthy learning environments. Meanwhile, too many students continue to suffer from the ongoing effects of the pandemic — academically, socially, emotionally and mentally.
Community schools may provide a promising strategy for addressing these challenges because they emphasize the holistic nature of both student needs and effective school improvement efforts. During the pandemic, many districts were in essence implementing a community schools approach when they and their partners worked to facilitate widespread and equitable access to meals, child care, computing devices, broadband connections and Covid-19 testing and vaccination while also creating learning opportunities that transcended school walls.
These actions recognize that students learn best when they feel safe and valued; that learning happens everywhere, not just in school settings; that families are instrumental to student success; and that organizations throughout the community play key roles in helping students to maximize their potential. At a time when educators are overwhelmed by personal and professional pressures, it is clearer than ever that school systems cannot do this alone.
For this reason, California’s $3 billion investment to promote community schools is a welcome development, as are other additional resources available to support student learning.
However, these new resources are arriving at a time when school districts are strained to the very limits of their capacity by the resurging demands of community health needs, staffing shortages, lost instructional time and exhaustion from two years of working through the uncertainty and complexities of the pandemic. Planning and preparing multiple funding applications under these conditions make it difficult for local administrators to ensure that efforts to support students are aligned and mutually reinforcing.
For the past 15 years, we have worked with a diverse collection of district leaders, researchers, policymakers, support providers, advocates and funders to better understand and support improvement in school systems across the state.
A November 2021 meeting of the California Collaborative on District Reform emphasized two key factors as vital to the effective implementation of any state policy effort, including community schools:
The meeting also identified several aspects of the current environment that could undercut the potential for achieving these conditions. A wave of separate one-time funding streams, for example, each with short timelines and specific requirements for achieving siloed programmatic goals, can lead to fragmentation, compliance-oriented responses and short-sighted resource allocation decisions.
In light of these concerns, we offer the following considerations for finalizing the details of the California Community Schools Partnership Program:
Eight years ago, the Local Control Funding Formula ushered in a new educational paradigm. LCFF was a direct response to years of categorical proliferation in which improvement efforts were fragmented by funding stream instead of being coordinated around student learning goals. The community schools model has the potential to facilitate a coherent and aligned approach that is responsive to and tailored to the assets and needs of a local community — the very best of “local control.”
We urge the state to approach its community schools commitment in a way that honors and creates the conditions for it to succeed.
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Joel Knudson is a principal researcher at the American Institutes for Research and the incoming chair of the California Collaborative on District Reform. Jennifer O’Day is an institute fellow at the American Institutes for Research and is the founder and outgoing chair of the California Collaborative on District Reform.
The opinions expressed in this commentary represent those of the authors. EdSource welcomes commentaries representing diverse points of view. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.
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