Dear Coordinators Network,

The Coalition for Community Schools has a new goal of 25,000 community schools by 2025. To achieve that goal, our first step is reaching consensus on the baseline qualifications of a community school.

As eyes and ears on the ground, your input is extremely valuable in establishing the fundamental elements of a school to be considered a Community School. This will allow us to vet and count the number of Community Schools to identify our current baseline count and monitor the movement’s progress as we all work toward 2025.

After discussions amongst the Coordinator Network leadership team, the Community Schools Leadership Network’s leadership team, and a working group from the Coalition’s Steering Committee, the following three criteria were identified as must haves: 

These three criteria were selected knowing that community schools progress through stages of development. With the understanding that a school is a community school starting at the emerging phase, we narrowed down the Site Standards to the minimum criteria a school needs to reach in order to be considered a community school.

Out of the 10 standards, we focused on the standards that would separate a community school from any other public school. Many schools do family engagement, have community partners, or look at student data, etc. but, only a community school would have collaborative leadership AND coordinating infrastructure, AND do intentional planning. We chose what we believe to be the three foundational structures of a community school that sets them up to do all the other programming and components that a high-quality excelling and maturing community school would have.

With all that said, what are your initial reactions? Do these three criteria accurately reflect the minimum threshold of an emerging community school? Tell us what you think by replying back to this email with your feedback or calling Jenn Masutani at 202-822-8405 x125.

Sincerely,

The Coalition Team