(Washington, DC) – Today, the Coalition for Community Schools at the Institute for Educational Leadership released Scaling Up School and Community Partnerships: The Community Schools Strategy.  Built on the experience of the growing number of local community schools initiatives across the country, this guide will help school districts and their public and private community partners organize and mobilize the resources of the entire community to support student success. The guide is the culmination of a two-year project funded by the Stuart Foundation. 
 

 "As our schools and communities face the demanding task of educating an increasingly poor and diverse student population they must work together," said Martin Blank, Coalition Director and President of the Institute for Educational Leadership. "This guide shows them how to get the results that community schools are seeing across the country." 
 

In Tulsa, for example, school and community leaders have created the Tulsa Area Community Schools Initiative (TACSI).  They built a collaborative leadership structure that shares responsibility for getting results.  Together, the school districts, city, community agencies, OU-Tulsa and other community partners now operate 31 community schools.  Research shows that students in high-implementing TACSI community schools outperformed non-community schools by 32 points in math and by 19 points in reading.  To learn more about the results that community schools are attaining, go to www.communityschools.org/results.
 

Today there are more than 80 school districts and communities with community schools and many others in the planning stage.  The guide highlights community school systems in Chicago, Cincinnati, Evansville (IN), Lehigh Valley (PA), Kansas City (MO), Multnomah County (OR), Oakland (CA), South King County (WA), and Tulsa.
 

Coalition Chair Ira Harkavy, Director of the Netter Center for Community Partnerships at the University of Pennsylvania said, "The community school is the best vehicle available for knitting together school and community assets to achieve real change.  The results we are seeing argue that place-based initiatives such as Promise Neighborhoods, Choice Neighborhoods and Cradle to Career Models intended to improve the lives of students, families, and communities must include community schools."
 

The Scale-Up Guide can be accessed on the internet at www.communityschools.org/scalingup
 

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The Coalition for Community Schools is an alliance of national, state and local organizations in education K-16, youth development, community planning and development, family support, health and human services, higher education institutions, government and philanthropy as well as national, state and local community school networks. The Coalition advocates for community schools as the vehicle for strengthening schools, families and communities so that together they can improve student learning. It is a program of the Institute for Educational Leadership.

For more information on community schools please visit: www.communityschools.org.

 
Download a PDF of the press release.