by Infinite Culcleasure, Community Organizer + Policy Advocate

While the implementation of community schools as a strategy to combat inequity may be fairly new in Vermont, their long history in the United States offers a starting point to critically examine what the movement might have in store for us here. Community schools in the U.S. can be traced back to some rural communities in the late 1890's into the 1920's - Iowa, Alabama, and in the early 1930's as well in New Mexico. Even the well-known community activist and organizer Jane Addams was influential in developing the thinking around community schools with her work at Hull House in Chicago.

There was also the storied Benjamin Franklin High School in East Harlem, New York City in 1934, where the goals included “building and strengthening social networks, developing local democratic processes, and advancing social welfare; and that achieving and sustaining these locally defined ends is an essential precondition for educating the community’s youth, as well as for reconciling the claims of individual social mobility and the need for knowledgeable, publicly engaged citizens. Implementing these purposes required agreement among Franklin’s various and.”

There is plenty to unpack in the community schools realm, and reams of paper have been used to discuss the contemporary community schools landscape. For example, a RAND report broadly describes a community school as a partnership among school staff, families, youth, and the community to raise student achievement by ensuring that children are physically, emotionally, and socially prepared to learn.

According to the Coalition for Community Schools, a community school is a public school and ”the hub of its neighborhood, uniting educators, community partners, and families to provide all students with top-quality academics, enrichment, health and social services, and opportunities to learn and thrive.”

Community school researchers and practitioners Maier, Daniel, Oakes and Lam provide a lengthy, evidence-based report on community schools as “an effective school improvement strategy”. among their findings:

Comprehensive community school interventions have a positive impact, with programs in many different locations showing improvements in student outcomes, including attendance, academic achievement, high school graduation rates, and reduced racial and economic achievement gaps.
Existing cost-benefit research suggests an excellent return on investment of up to $15 in social value and economic benefits for every dollar spent on school-based wraparound services.

Many describe “full-service community schools” (FSCS) as “poverty-mitigating interventions” that integrate social and health services, extended learning opportunities, family and community engagement, and collaborative leadership.

Some liberatory community school practitioners assert that our public schools are rooted in inequity by design, and that “no system that is a true meritocracy can have such predictable results.” For example, for years it has been reliably predictable to find significant disparities in reading proficiency between third grade students who receive free and reduced lunch’ (FRL) and third grade students not receiving free and reduced lunch (NFRL) (e.g. according to the Burlington School District’s 2019-20 Equity and Inclusion report, third-grade reading proficiency gaps between students receiving ‘free and reduced lunch’ (FRL) and students not receiving free and reduced lunch (NFRL) increased from FRL 45% vs. NFRL 81% in 2018-19, to FRL 43% vs. NFRL 78% in 2019-20, to FRL 30% vs. 70% NFRL.)

With the premise that our public schools are rooted in inequity by design, simply wrapping services around schools where systemic oppression has been taking place for centuries has been referred to as an ‘additive’ approach to developing and implementing community schools. A metaphor that has been offered to describe this dynamic is when a plant has root rot, a condition that overwatering cannot reverse.

Others have been suspicious of community schools as a possible means for privatization, conflating them with the proliferation of charter schools being funded by corporations across the U.S. The same camp of stakeholders lament the lack of engagement of teachers in the planning and implementation of community schools.

Sources say that Vermont is one of three states (along with California and NYC) to allocate federal funds from ARPA/ESSER to support community schools. This might imply some exceptionalism on the part of Vermont for being among such a small number of states to make this investment. Yet, while that may be true in some respects, in other ways (in a historical sense) the dynamics of how community schools are being discussed in Vermont resembles some of the tensions that existed generations ago.

Some of the challenges that exist today in conceptualizing and implementing community schools are highlighted by the authors Johanek and Puckett in their seminal work, The Making of Benjamin Franklin High School: Education as if Citizenship Mattered observe:

“The community school idea was contested, in that progressive reformers of different ideological suasions often used the same language and institutional forms to further their social agendas. Social progressives advanced a citizen-centered conception of community schooling, which they associated with the political goal of local democratic development. By contrast, reforming professionals–social workers and professional community organizers, health care experts, recreation specialists, and university professors, among others—supported a client-centered conception that limited community schooling to service delivery, a goal that had nothing to do with politics.”

We are still faced with these tensions in 2022, as new opportunities in the form of significant federal funding, and old challenges in the form of who gets to decide how implementation takes place at the local level, present themselves as being highly contextual and should be understood in their particular time and location.

While I’m embracing the broad interest in community schools, I’m also curious about how community schools will be conceptualized in the coming years, especially as it relates to school climate and family engagement. Family engagement has been a longstanding challenge for most public schools. Research has found that in Vermont, “state statutes and policies failed to address parent and family engagement.”

Such findings, and some of my own experiences as a community organizer has brought me to a series of questions, such as:

Who is included in the community?
What shall pass as active family and community engagement?
How will “equity” be operationalized?
Who will get to define the challenges, opportunities, and what thriving community schools look like? What is progress and/or success?
If any school can be a community school, then how will the stewarts of our public resources go about determining how to distribute resources among them?

What questions do you have about community schools?

Journeying through histories of Community Schools