Moving from survival to fulfillment: A planning framework for community schools 

Community schools are designed to integrate a variety of academic programs, social services, and economic supports for students, families, and community members by strategically bringing resources from partner organizations into schools. This holistic approach moves beyond a narrow focus on individual children and considers the larger forces that influence students’ well-being.  

While community schools operate in a wide range of urban and rural areas, they play particularly important roles in neighborhoods affected by poverty, systematic disinvestment, and segregation (Shaia, 2016; Shaia & Crowder, 2017). One of the key figures in every community school is the site coordinator, a dedicated member of the school’s leadership team who identifies students and families’ most pressing needs and directs resources to help meet them. Today, though, when all kinds of schools are subject to constant measurement and tough demands for accountability, community school coordinators are confronting difficult questions about their work. Critics ask, for example, precisely what outcomes do they hope to achieve? And why favor the community schools model rather than other approaches for delivering services to those who need them?  

In this article, we offer a planning framework meant to help flesh out the mission, goals, and desired outcomes of local community schools, as well as to highlight the distinct value of the larger community schools model. Specifically, we describe what are typically called the transactional and transformative approaches to coordinating and delivering services, and we suggest a third approach, which we call fulfillment, that points toward more ambitious outcomes for children and other community members.