The community schools model allows local educational agencies to help fill critical gaps in student and family needs by integrating support services, family engagement and collaborative decision-making over school programming, resource offerings and more. Schools work with local government and community partners to improve student outcomes.
“We started the initiative in 2019 … around this concept of making schools the hub of community services, ensuring that students and parents had a bigger role — an equal role — in deciding on initiatives and things that their school needed,” explained LACOE Superintendent Debra Duardo. “It was also looking at our most high need, most vulnerable areas of the county and identifying schools that could really use additional support. It was about making sure that we were supporting those sites and training them and preparing them to run strong community schools.”
What LACOE officials found was that most schools didn’t have a dedicated person assigned or a model to use to bring resources to a school. Duardo said it would often be a teacher or an administrator trying to coordinate partnerships on top of doing their own work that made growth especially challenging.
“The vision was to provide these identified 15 sites with two staff people that could actually do the work, that could bring together a council, that could do a school community assessment and have the community say, ‘These are the types of things that we want to see different at our school, these are our strengths, these are the areas where we can improve and this is how we want to do better,’” said Duardo. “And it was really successful, because out of those initial 15 schools, it went on to become an initiative at the state level.”
The R-TAC helps build capacity among local schools in writing grants to the state for community school funds and trains site staff on collecting meaningful data to monitor program outcomes and adjust as needed.
Working in partnership with UCLA and LA Trust helped LACOE to determine what data needed to be captured and how to make sure that there’s a strong evaluation component so that LEAs would be able to measure the impact of different program components, among other things, Duardo said. UCLA was especially helpful in providing training to districts on data collection using “a systems approach.”
“A lot of the role, especially for UCLA, was the evaluation component and really identifying — now that we’ve been in this for a few years and we’ve been collecting data, analyzing the data, looking at where we’ve done well — is there something else that we need to measure?” she said.
Beginning this school year, LACOE’s Community Schools Initiative has expanded its support to over 500 community schools in the region with the addition of new CCSPP grantees.
More recently, staff have been proactive in addressing immigration-related concerns by regularly sharing resources and training sessions with community schools throughout the region. Coordinating these efforts has helped ensure that support systems remain accessible and responsive to the evolving needs of children, families and school communities.
“We’ve been doing this for over five years now, and it’s just a good framework and we’re seeing a lot of success because of it,” Duardo said. “Looking at systems and looking at how we as a county can ensure that everybody has a place at the table, that we can come up with these common goals and then bring in partners to help get us there — I think it’s really making a difference and having a direct impact on our students. And some of the resources are coming in to help support the teachers or the employees. If you have burnt-out teachers, they’re not able to really be effective in the classroom and help their students. I think it’s a framework where everybody wins.”