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The Biden-Harris Administration recognizes the critical role community schools play in providing comprehensive services to students that promote their academic achievement and overall well-being. In the most recent bipartisan funding bill, the President secured $150 million for the Full-Service Community Schools program. This means the program is twice as large as last year and five times as large as when President Biden came into office. This toolkit is designed primarily to help community school leaders, coordinators, advocates, and other stakeholders understand the current scope of federal funding that can be used to support community schools. This toolkit identifies federal resources that can support one or more of the four pillars of an evidence-based community school and bolster community schools’ success: 1) integrated student supports; 2) active family and community engagement; 3) expanded and enriched learning time and opportunities; and 4) collaborative leadership practices.

Scaling Up School and Community Partnerships: The Community Schools Strategy builds on both practice and research to describe the what, why, and how of system-wide expansion of community schools. The guide is written for a wide audience and for communities at different points in planning for, implementing, and sustaining a community schools strategy. It targets grass-roots advocates, including parents, students, teachers, and community partners; school district, civic, business, and government leaders; and funders at the local, state, and national levels.

With strategic and financial support from the Ballmer Group, four national partners – the Center for Universal Education at Brookings Institution, the Coalition for Community Schools (CCS), the Learning Policy Institute (LPI), and the National Center for Community Schools at Children’s Aid (NCCS) – are collaborating with practitioners, researchers, and leaders across the country to elevate areas of alignment and consensus across various community school approaches to further align, build, and scale community schools.

This report looks at how community schools finance their work. It describes the resources, partnerships, and activities community schools generate with the dollars they have; where monies come from; and the mechanisms community schools use to leverage additional funding and build their capacity to achieve agreed upon results. The report draws on survey results and case studies from a purposeful sample of experienced community schools—both individual sites as well as district-sponsored initiatives.