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The March for Children and Youth Month Playbook is designed to provide simple steps to advocate for Community Schools as a vehicle to address inequities children face every day!

March for Children and Youth Month was launched in 2017 as an annual campaign to concentrate our advocacy efforts among our national, state and local partners. Our collective advocacy as a Coalition is important both to build champions among our policymakers for policies and funding that support children and youth and to strengthen our role as advocates for children and youth who are facing systemic inequities in their communities. Although we have seen a steady decline in child poverty rates over the last few years, the percentage of Black and Hispanic students living in poverty is almost four times that of their white peers. With racial disparities in school, we can no longer sit on the sidelines and hope others advocate for more equitable conditions-it must be us, it must be now, and we must speak with one voice.

The Coalition for Community Schools is dedicated to advancing a shared vision of “schools as centers for creating communities where everyone belongs, works together, and thrives”, and is grounded through a shared set of principles: build on community strengths, invest in trusting relationships, and commit to continuous improvement. This document outlines our shared policy goals to advance Community Schools.

This 3-pager lifts up 8 key talking points to help support Bipartisan Community Schools advocacy.

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.

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.

Letter to Chairwoman DeLauro, Chairwoman Murray, Ranking Member Cole, and Ranking Member Blunt to encourage them to significantly increase funding for the Full-Service Community Schools Program (Title IV Part F of the Every Student Succeeds Act) to match President Biden’s 2022 budget request of $443 million. Community schools is a critical strategy to help schools and communities recover and stabilize from the ongoing effects of the pandemic, and an effective strategy of a whole-child approach to public education that is necessary now more than ever.