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The Biden-Harris Administration recognizes the critical role community schools play in providing comprehensive services to students that promote their academic achievement and overall well-being. In the most recent bipartisan funding bill, the President secured $150 million for the Full-Service Community Schools program. This means the program is twice as large as last year and five times as large as when President Biden came into office. This toolkit is designed primarily to help community school leaders, coordinators, advocates, and other stakeholders understand the current scope of federal funding that can be used to support community schools. This toolkit identifies federal resources that can support one or more of the four pillars of an evidence-based community school and bolster community schools’ success: 1) integrated student supports; 2) active family and community engagement; 3) expanded and enriched learning time and opportunities; and 4) collaborative leadership practices.

Scaling Up School and Community Partnerships: The Community Schools Strategy builds on both practice and research to describe the what, why, and how of system-wide expansion of community schools. The guide is written for a wide audience and for communities at different points in planning for, implementing, and sustaining a community schools strategy. It targets grass-roots advocates, including parents, students, teachers, and community partners; school district, civic, business, and government leaders; and funders at the local, state, and national levels.

With strategic and financial support from the Ballmer Group, four national partners – the Center for Universal Education at Brookings Institution, the Coalition for Community Schools (CCS), the Learning Policy Institute (LPI), and the National Center for Community Schools at Children’s Aid (NCCS) – are collaborating with practitioners, researchers, and leaders across the country to elevate areas of alignment and consensus across various community school approaches to further align, build, and scale community schools.

This report outlines six essential strategies for Community Schools and the key mechanisms used to implement these strategies. Next, it profiles Community Schools across the country where these model strategies are being used to achieve transformational results. A close look at these model Community Schools and districts shows that across racial, economic, and geographic diversities in this country, Community Schools work. As the new federal education legislation gives states greater power to implement Community Schools, we recommend learning from the strategies and mechanisms we provide in this report—both from research and from practice—to achieve transformational and sustainable Community Schools across the country.

Stages of Development for creating and growing your State Coalition.

This blueprint provides examples of how Community Schools effectively responded to the pandemic, highlighting “how” Community Schools operate through collaborative leadership, and offers recommendations for state and local educators, community leaders, and others on how to leverage Community Schools as a core strategy for communities to efficiently and effectively recover while transforming education and accelerating economic mobility.

This report has three objectives:​ 1) To create greater awareness of youth (ages 12-25) experiences throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.​ 2) To highlight clear recommendations and examples of how different communities have been able to address and meet the needs of youth​. 3) To provide a clear process to develop and implement empowering youth engagement strategies.

The American Rescue Plan Act offers school and community leaders an unprecedented opportunity to reinvigorate our public schools as engines of equity and democracy.

Version 2.0 A COMPANION DOCUMENT TO MASSACHUSETTS FAMILY ENGAGEMENT FRAMEWORK FOR PRACTITIONERS AND EDUCATORS