By Jansen Azarias-Suzumoto, Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder at Higher Ground
For decades, Arizona has struggled to deliver the kind of educational outcomes our students deserve. Year after year, we rank near the bottom nationally. Often, we sit between 45th and 50th in key education indicators. These rankings are not abstract. They reflect real classrooms, real families, and real communities navigating instability, trauma, and unmet needs that directly affect learning.
Against that backdrop, the Community School movement has been steadily gaining momentum in Arizona, transforming educational outcomes by engaging strong community partners to address barriers to student success. For years, educators, nonprofits, and cross-sector partners, many of us rooted in Tucson, have been advancing this work, demonstrating that when schools are supported by strong community partnerships, student outcomes improve.
One example of this momentum can be found in Higher Ground’s Restart SMART initiative, an Arizona-born adaptation of the Community School strategy that emerged from early cross-sector work in Tucson and, over more than a decade, has demonstrated sustained gains in attendance, behavior, family engagement, and academic performance across charter and district schools, earning national recognition along the way.
Results from this initiative have been visible and consistent. Attendance increases. Behavior stabilizes. Families engage. Schools become places of support, not just instruction. These shifts have also translated into measurable academic gains, with several partner schools improving state letter grades over time, including movement from F ratings to Cs and Bs across multiple campuses with those gains maintained across multiple years.
Over a two- to three-year period, schools implementing this model have seen chronic absenteeism decrease by as much as 21% and average attendance increase by 8.8%. During the same period, compared to relatively minimal changes across their broader district contexts. Schools have also experienced a 92% reduction in school-wide threats, including significant declines in aggression and drug-related incidents, while family engagement has more than doubled through a restructured support model.
These outcomes are measurable and important, but they are only part of the story. These numbers are the results of educators, families, and students whose lives have been empowered through the access and support they receive.
It looks like families avoiding homelessness during moments of crisis. Students once labeled as “trouble-makers” stepping into leadership roles within their schools. Neighborhood associations organizing fundraisers because the school has become something worth investing in. It looks like systems responding quickly enough that challenges do not become permanent setbacks.
And in some cases, it looks like something far more personal and difficult to measure. One parent shared that their daughter, after building trust, felt safe enough to disclose ongoing sexual abuse. Through coordinated support, advocacy, and follow-through, the student was able to find safety and pursue justice. For that family, the impact was not just academic or behavioral. It was life-altering.
To quote P L Julian School Principal Aimee Marques, “Higher Ground’s Restart SMART initiative has added tremendous value by connecting us with community partners and creating pathways for students to thrive beyond the classroom. For example, when one student was struggling to make positive choices, we connected him to a local boxing gym for mentorship and structure after school. Connections like this help students see our school as a place that cares for not only their performance at school but their engagement, confidence, and future. These kinds of individualized, responsive supports—along with their ability to mobilize resources quickly—have elevated the sense of community, belonging, and care on our campus.”
Despite years of evidence of the Community School strategy’s effectiveness, support to continue this work has been inconsistent. State level investments have wavered and attempts to solidify supportive policies have been unsuccessful, resulting in challenges sustaining this work on the ground. Momentum and champions for this work continue to grow and proof of its efficacy is tangible, yet commitment at a state level is fluctuating.
This contradiction of strong outcomes paired with fluctuating support is the context in which today’s Community School work in Arizona must be understood.
Why the Community School Strategy Works
At its core, the Community School strategy is not about asking schools to do more. It’s about enabling schools to do what they are trained to do – that is, to teach – while still addressing the reality that our students and families cannot learn effectively when hungry, homeless, dealing with trauma, complex mental health issues, and other issues of poverty.
Educators are experts in instruction, curriculum, and academic development. They are not resourced, structured, or staffed to coordinate housing stability, behavioral health, family engagement, food access, or crisis response at scale. Expecting schools to absorb these responsibilities without dedicated infrastructure only accelerates burnout and fragmentation.
This is where strong community partnerships matter, and where a structure that focuses on intentional coordination of such partners becomes integral to sustainability and success.
The Critical Role of Coordination
Central to effective Community School work is not a single organization or person acting as a service provider, but instead a clear coordination function. This can be embodied by a Community School Coordinator (CSC) whose role is not to deliver services, but to connect, align, and mobilize a network of partners around the needs of students and families.
Whether this coordination function is housed within a community-based organization or embedded within a school district matters less than the commitment to resourcing it properly. What is important is having a trusted connector with the authority, relationships, and systems to bring together businesses, community-based organizations, service providers, and local leaders into a coherent structure that can respond collectively. When this function is strong, expertise is distributed rather than centralized, and no single entity is expected to do everything.
In practice, this means the CSC coordinates real-time responses when students and families are facing instability. They align school staff, housing partners, behavioral health supports, and other resources so learning disruptions are minimized.
Equally important, this coordination must be driven by community voice. That includes the lived experience of students and families themselves, not as symbolic representation, but as active participants shaping priorities and solutions. At the same time, community voice must be paired with data-driven decision-making, ensuring that needs are identified systematically, resources are deployed strategically, and responses are adjusted based on real patterns rather than assumptions.
When coordination works well, it does not feel like a program layered onto a school. It feels like shared ownership of student success. Schools become a place where educators focus on learning, partners contribute their distinct strengths, and the community helps guide the work toward what actually matters.
Percy L Julian School: School and Neighborhood Collaborative Leadership
Percy L Julian School in South Phoenix offers a clear example of what this kind of partnership can look like when roles are clear, expertise is distributed, and leadership is aligned.
At the center of Higher Ground’s partnership with Percy Julian School is the placement and support of a CSC. The CSC is not a service provider and does not replace existing school staff.
At Julian, this coordination function is fully integrated into the school’s operating logic. Student interventions, family engagement strategies, and systems coordination happen in partnership with school leadership and Higher Ground’s Community School Coordinator. Each has a distinct role; educators focus on instruction and learning. Higher Ground coordinates the systems and partnerships that stabilize students and families. Neither replaces the other; both are necessary.
What has allowed this work to move faster and more effectively than some Community School efforts, however, is that Percy L Julian School is operating within a larger ecosystem of community collaboration.
Alongside the school-based work sits Future Framework, a cross-sector collaborative that functions as the Community School strategy’s steering committee at a neighborhood scale. This collaborative brings together nonprofit organizations, a leadership development group, community members, businesses, universities, data experts, and developers. Each contributes distinct expertise and resources that no single agency could provide alone. These efforts are informed by strategic analysis of the social determinants of health in South Phoenix and coordinated toward shared, long-term outcomes for families and the community.
Future Framework reflects what decades of research and lived experience have shown: when Community Schools are taken in the right direction, they move beyond school transformation alone and become a neighborhood development strategy. This shift matters because academic outcomes are deeply tied to the conditions students experience beyond the classroom.
School performance has historically been driven by zip code and neighborhood conditions. Housing instability, transportation access, food insecurity, safety, health, and economic stress: these factors become barriers for students, and shape whether students are able to actively engage in learning. Improving school conditions, therefore, requires working in the neighborhood, not just the school building.
At Higher Ground, our work is guided by core commitments: one of which is that improving community outcomes, the conditions in which families live, is essential to improving educational outcomes. At Julian, Future Framework provides the structure to act on that commitment at a community wide level. It allows the school to be supported by a coordinated neighborhood ecosystem rather than bearing the weight of systemic challenges alone.
Just as important, the collaborative is guided by community voice and data together. Families and students inform priorities based on lived experience, while data ensures that decisions are grounded in real patterns and real-time needs. This combination prevents both top-down planning and anecdotal drift, allowing resources to be deployed strategically and adjusted over time.
Leadership That Embraces Complexity
In this context, Julian’s progress is not the result of a single program or organization. It is the product of aligned leadership, clear division of expertise, and a neighborhood-level commitment to shared responsibility for student success.
Central to that alignment is the leadership of Principal Aimee Marques. Over years of Community School work, one conclusion has remained consistent: the strategy’s success is highly reliant on the principal’s commitment and engagement.
Structures matter. Partnerships matter. Funding matters. But without a principal who can lead through complexity, community schools struggle to move beyond the margins.
At Julian, principal leadership has not meant insulating the school from partnership or outsourcing responsibility. It has meant creating the conditions for integration and collaborative leadership. This level of integration is possible because a broader team within the school works alongside Higher Ground, creating a culture of cooperation that allows teachers to focus on instruction knowing their students are supported. In this environment, outside expertise is welcomed, roles are clearly defined, and decisions remain anchored in what best supports learning. Educators are trusted to teach. Partners are trusted to do what they do best. The result is forward movement without the friction that often slows similar efforts.
This leadership has been especially important in a neighborhood shaped by long-standing instability and repeated disruption. Like many communities across Arizona, South Phoenix has experienced school closures and shifting institutional commitments. These events leave lasting impacts on families and erode trust in school systems over time.
Against that backdrop, trust cannot be assumed. It must be earned through consistency, clarity, and follow-through. Julian’s progress reflects leadership that understands this reality and is willing to build partnership carefully, demonstrating over time that community collaboration will strengthen the school rather than destabilize it.
Julian’s story is not a departure from Arizona’s reality. Julian reflects the realities facing many Title I schools across Arizona, but demonstrates what becomes possible when coordination and leadership are aligned.
Holding Complexity Together
Julian’s experience reinforces a simple but often overlooked truth: Community Schools succeed not because the work is easy, but because the work is allowed to be honest. It would be far easier to try to solve problems one at a time. To focus only on academics. Or only on family engagement. Or only on reestablishing community trust in our school systems. It would be far easier for a single leader or organization to hold steady in isolation, moving forward without the friction that comes from shared ownership.
But real outcomes for youth do not come from simplicity. They come from the willingness to hold complexity. This moment requires us to address student learning and conditions of the wider community at the same time. Even when doing so is messier, slower, and harder to manage.
Community Schools reject the idea of the solo hero, a silver-bullet program, or a single framework saving schools. Instead, they rely on many people, educators, families, partners, and community members to hold steady together and contribute their distinct assets. Progress emerges not from perfect alignment, but from sustained commitment, diverse perspectives, and shared responsibility. In communities shaped by instability, it is this collective steadiness, not individual strength, that creates the conditions for lasting change.
The path forward requires leaders across the public, private, and community sectors who are willing to move beyond isolated programs and invest in coordinated systems of support. Prioritizing this kind of infrastructure ensures that schools are no longer left to confront systemic challenges alone, but are supported by a broader community committed to the long-term success of students and families.