Community schools offer opportunity to reimagine
Watching the State of the Union address on March 7, it was wonderful to see one of New Mexico’s best educational talents in the audience: Tatiana Del Toro-Frank, the community school coordinator at MacArthur Elementary in Las Cruces.
A guest of U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich, Ms. Del ToroFrank was chosen to attend the event to highlight the critical role that community schools play in supporting the academic success, healthy development, and social-emotional well-being of students statewide.
Although community schools have been around for many years, this important school transformation strategy is still not widely known in New Mexico. At the Southwest Institute for Transformational Community Schools — known as SWIFT — we believe that community schools represent our state’s best opportunity to reimagine public education by centering the voices of students and families and creating space for shared leadership and decision-making among students, families, educators and community members.
To that end, a community school engages the entire school and its community in providing students the targeted support and resources they need to succeed in the classroom: from helping families navigate access to health care, mental health services, food, and the internet, to providing workforce training, literacy development, tutoring, and safe afterschool programming.
When implemented well, community schools are an evidence-based approach to mitigating the barriers to learning that exist within our state’s historically marginalized and underserved communities, contributing to better educational outcomes across a wide range of measures.
At the heart of the community school is the community school coordinator, the role that Ms. Del Toro-Frank plays at her school. Community school coordinators create the conditions necessary for shared leadership and effective community partnerships to take root, and they ensure that these partnerships are responsive to the unique needs and assets of the students and families in their school community.
Seeing the promise in this approach, many school districts and charter schools in recent years have chosen to transform existing schools into community schools. With support from the Community Schools Act, which was signed into law by Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham in 2019, the New Mexico Public Education Department currently provides funding to 91 community schools, and we estimate that there are an additional 30-plus community schools implementing the framework but not receiving state funding throughout New Mexico.
More recently, schools around the state have begun benefitting from significant federal investments led by Sen. Heinrich. In 2022, Sen. Heinrich supported schools in Las Cruces, Albuquerque, and Taos to submit successful applications for Federal Full-Service Community Schools grants totaling nearly $7.5 million. And, through his role on the Appropriations Committee, the senator directed an additional $1.8 million to support community school capacity building and sustainability across New Mexico.
With that $1.8 million grant, the National Education Association–New Mexico, ABC Community School Partnership in Albuquerque, and Communities In Schools of New Mexico launched SWIFT Community Schools. The establishment of SWIFT is a game-changer for New Mexico, providing leadership development and technical assistance to community school practitioners statewide, and creating the policy conditions necessary for community schools to realize their full potential as a school transformation strategy.
We are grateful to Sen. Heinrich and President Biden for their continued support of community schools at the federal level. As New Mexicans, we are proud to have Ms. Del Toro-Frank representing our state’s students, families and educators at the State of the Union. Her presence sends a strong message that the best investment we can make to improve the health, economic vitality, and future of our state is the investment in our community schools and the community school professionals who work tirelessly to ensure that all students have the support necessary to thrive.