NEW The National Collaborative on Workforce and Disability for Youth (NCWD/Youth) has released Preparing All Youth for Academic and Career Readiness: Implications for High School Policy and Practice.

This paper identifies the challenges in practice and policy for successful post-school outcomes and it offers recommendations on how states, local school districts and individual high schools can prepare all youth, including youth with disabilities, with the academic and career readiness skills. Based on two symposia and a year-long research effort, this paper identifies five broad policy and practice areas: (1) Instruction, Curriculum and Structure; (2) Assessment Practices; (3) Graduation Requirements; (4) Community and Family Connections; and (5) Data Quality Challenges. The paper suggests that by addressing these areas, a range of high school policy makers at the national, state, and local levels can improve their approaches for meeting the multiple and complex challenges of all their students.

Full Service Community Schools Grant Announcement

The Department of Education has issued the grant announcement for the Full Service Community Schools program. Grant applications are due April 15, 2008. A total of $4.9 Million is available for awards ranging from $75,000-$500,000. The estimated average size of awards is $415,000, and the maximum award is $500,000 per year. View the announcement: Text or PDF

Coalition Strategic Planning

The Coalition's new Strategic Plan calls for developing more and more effective community schools by 2014. Click to read more.

Community Schools National Awards for Excellence

The 2007 award recognized three schools and three communities:

The Coalition honored the award winners at a breakfast on Capitol Hill on June 14th in the Energy and Commerce Hearing Room at the Rayburn House Office Building.  The breakfast included remarks by House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, who recently introduced the Full Service Community Schools Act.  This was followed by an in-depth panel discussion with award winners who articulated the focus on the results they are achieving for young people, their families and their communities. 

Click here to go to Awards homepage.

We are pleased to announce a new on-line resource for community school leaders and practitioner:
Community Schools: A Rationale and Results Framework for Student Success

This tool features specific results that community schools seek for students, families and communities, and indicators for measuring progress toward these results. Also included in this resource is a tool to guage the capacity of a community school to attain results, a research document that supports the indicators we have identified, a menu of data sources for each indicator and results frameworks that have been developed by local initiatives.  We would like to include your results framework on our website.  If you have one you are willing to share, please send it to or contact Shital Shah at 202-822-8405x100

PTA Magazine Features Community Schools

Community schools are the focus of the February/March issue of the national PTA magazine, Our Children. The issue emphasizes the ways in which schools engage their communities to improve student success. The Coalition is grateful to the National PTA, a Coalition partner, for their focus on community schools.  To read the magazine, click here.

Communities In Schools and the Public Education Network (PEN) Testify Before Senate

NEW Book about Community Schools Released

Dewey's Dream:  Universities and Democracies in an Age of Education Reform, By Lee Benson, Ira Harkavy and John Puckett

Ira Harkavy, Chair of the Coalition for Community Schools, Lee Benson and John Puckett’s new book is described as a “timely, persuasive, and hopeful [reexamination of] John Dewey's idea of schools, specifically community schools, as the best places to grow a democratic society that is based on racial, social, and economic justice. The authors assert that American colleges and universities bear a responsibility for-and would benefit substantially from-working with schools to develop democratic schools and communities.

For ordering information, please click here.

Learn More From These Recent Publications

The Will to Change:  A Conversation about Schools and Learning with James Comer and Edmund Gordon.  (920 KB PDF)
In this new Coalition publication, Dr. James Comer and Professor Edmund Gordon engage in an animated and thought-provoking dialogue on the educational challenges and political inequities facing America’s students and families.

Community and Family Engagement: Principals Share What Works.
Informed by the work of principals,  this paper finds six keys to community engagement that help school leaders engage families, staff, partners and the larger community in the life of the school.  To read the paper, click here.

All Together Now: Sharing Responsibility for the Whole Child. 
This paper, commissioned and published by the Association for Supervision  and Curriculum Development, provides a rationale for why schools and communities must work together.  To read the paper,  click here. 

Growing Community Schools: The Role of Cross-Boundary Leadership.
This new Coalition  report highlights work in 11 communities where leaders are working together in new ways to "grow" community schools. To read the report, click here.

Community-Based Learning: Engaging Students for Success and Citizenship.
Discover how community schools are using real-world, hands-on problem solving to ignite the imagination and the intellect of our young people. To read the report, click here.  

For More Information, Contact us at or 202-822-8405.