State awards more than $65.5M in grants for community schools
This week, California is jumpstarting a seven-year initiative to convert potentially thousands of schools into full-service, parent-focused community schools.
Approved a year ago by the Legislature, the $3 billion California Community Schools Partnership Program will be the nation’s most ambitious effort to create schools serving multiple health and learning needs of children.
Community schools have come to be known as schools with “wraparound services.” The underlying assumption is that a holistic approach to education, particularly in low-income areas with unmet basic needs, creates the best conditions for children to thrive emotionally and academically. Gov. Gavin Newsom is proposing to increase the community schools program by $1.5 billion — 50 percent — in his revised 202223 state budget, which he released on May 13.
At its meeting Wednesday, the State Board of Education approved $635 million in planning and implementation grants for 265 school districts, county offices of education and charter schools, according to education officials.
On the recommendation of the California Department of Education,
192 districts, county offices of education and charter schools will receive $200,000 two-year planning grants in the first round.
The other 73 districts, with at least some existing community schools, will receive implementation grants covering 444 schools; each school will receive over five years between $712,500 for schools with fewer than 150 students to $2.375 million for schools with more than 2,000 students. Schools serving at least 80 percent low-income children will receive priority funding.
Districts and charter schools
will be required to contribute an additional third as their match of the state grants.
Oakland Unified, a district with possibly the largest concentration of community schools in the nation, will be the biggest recipient, with $66 million to expand and supplement its community school network to 53 of the district’s 81 schools.
Curtiss Sarikey, chief of staff for the district, said he was excited by the news.
“We’d been doing this work for 10 years and have been poised for this moment,” he said. “The funding confirms that we have the systems in place to make the best use of these dollars, with the goal of improving results for kids.”
In Kern County, seven districts are slated to receive the planning grants, including the Arvin Union, Di Giorgio Elementary, El Tejon Unified School District, Fairfax Elementary, Kern High, Maricopa and Vineland school districts are receiving approximately $200,000.
Locally, the larger grants for implementation will be distributed to: Bakersfield City School District ($5,700,000 — for Stella I. Hills Elementary, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary, McKinley Elementary, and Emerson Middle School); Buttonwillow Union School District ($1,187,500 — for Buttonwillow School); Delano Union School District ($13,775,000 — for Albany Park, Princeton Street Elementary, Fremont Elementary, Del Visa Math and Science Academy, Terrace Elementary, Almond Tree Middle School, Harvest Elementary, Nueva Vista Language Academy, Cecil Avenue Math and Science Academy and Pioneer School);
Edison Elementary School District ($2,850,000 — for Edison Middle School and Orangewood Elementary School); Kern County Office of Education ($1,187,500 for Kern Community School); Kernville Union Elementary School District ($2,612,500 — for Woodrow Wallace Middle School and Woodrow W. Wallace Elementary School); Lamont Elementary School District ($3,325,000 — for Lamont Elementary and Alicante Avenue Elementary); Lost Hills Union Elementary School District ($8,312,500 — for Buena Vista High School, A.M. Thomas Middle School, Wasco Independence High School, Semitropic Elementary School, Lost Hill Elementary, Taft Union High School and Wasco Union High School); McFarland Unified School District ($7,125,000 — for Horizon Elementary, McFarland Junior High, Kern Avenue Elementary and McFarland High School Early College); Southern Kern Unified School District ($5,700,000 — for Rare Earth High, a continuation school, Abraham Lincoln Alternative, Tropico Middle School and Rosamond High Early College Campus and Rosamond Elementary); Standard School District ($5,700,000 — for Standard, Highland and Wingland elementary schools and Standard Middle School); and Wonderful College Prep Academy ($3,325,000 — for Wonderful College Prep Academy — Lost Hills, and Wonderful College Prep Academy — Delano).
BIG NEED WITH BIG FUNDING
Many districts, besieged this year with staff shortages, chronic student absences, COVIDmasking and testing challenges, appear to have taken an initial pass. More than two-thirds of the planning and implementation funding remains for future rounds. Depending on who applies, there may be more than 1,400 community schools, constituting about a third of the state’s schools with at least 80 percent low-income children.
The launch comes at a moment of clear need and abundant resources.
“The pandemic has highlighted the need to see schools as hubs for the community,” said Leslie Hu, a former social worker who is the community school coordinator at the Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in San Francisco. “We saw what happened to our young people and had to shift to better attend to their needs, to do things differently.”
Newsom made community schools a top TK-12 priority with last year’s unprecedented post-pandemic state budget surplus. But the funding, averaging several hundred thousand dollars per year per school, in itself will not massively expand services. There’ll be enough, depending on what each school chooses, to create a student wellness or parent center or add one or two staff, whether a family liaison, social worker, counselor or music teacher.
The top priority for schools, under the terms of the grant, must be to hire a school community coordinator. Like Hu in San Francisco, that person will be a key figure who must create and sustain partnerships with health-care providers, county agencies, nonprofit organizations and neighborhood groups – and to create cohesion among often disjointed programs and services.
In addition to community schools, Newsom and the Legislature have dedicated billions of dollars to new school programs that will unfold in the next several years: an expanded day and six-week summer school for all low-income elementary students; transitional kindergarten for 4-year-olds; free lunches and breakfasts for all students; expanded career pathways in high school; tens of millions of dollars for staff development, and hundreds of millions of dollars to hire K-three literacy coaches if the Legislature adopts his proposal.
These programs will benefit more than community schools, but they mesh fundamentally with their mission.
AN EXPERT’S CAUTIONARY WARNING
Milbrey McLaughlin, a professor emeritus of education and public policy at Stanford University, is a self-described fan of community schools who tracked their development over eight years in her 2020 book The Way We Do School: The Making of Oakland’s Full-Service Community School District. She said she was impressed by how schools addressed different needs “by involving families that never before had felt respected.”
“The family engagement in Oakland was impressive,” she said.
But she said she is worried whether administrators and teachers in districts receiving the funding will fundamentally change how they operate schools and open them to parents and the community. “Changing norms is hard and takes time,” she said. “I’m concerned that in 5 years, we will look at what we invested and not see results.”
Aware that districts will need guidance and help, the Newsom administration built in $166 million to fund a network of at least five regional technical assistance centers that will assist districts create community schools and oversee their progress. The Alameda County Office of Education will be the lead agency, if the State Board approves its $20 million grant.
The California Partnership for the Future of Learning, a coalition that includes Public Advocates, Advancement Project California, Californians for Justice, and PICO California wants tighter transparency and accountability requirements written into the community schools program.
In a letter to legislative leaders, the coalition calls for requiring community school grantees to annually report and publicly present to parents and the community on progress on achieving the goals, and an annual evaluation, backed by data, on whether the school’s practices are proving effective. The coalition also wants the state to prohibit using community school funding to staff police and safety officers.
“We don’t expect community schools to be strong immediately in all program’s cornerstone commitments and four pillars, but they should assess where they are and whether they are responsive to their communities,” said Erin Apte, senior legislative counsel for Public Advocates.
Sarikey’s advice to districts starting community schools is take the long view.
“Five years is a fabulous time to implement and try to get some different results. It’s also not that long in the big picture,” he said. “I would ask, ‘How do you think about sustainability from Day 1?’ What systems, processes and ownership are you going to build so this doesn’t become just another grant program, a flash in the pan. And then when the five years goes away, so does a large part of what you once started.”