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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 outlines six essential strategies for Community Schools and the key mechanisms used to implement these strategies. Next, it profiles Community Schools across the country where these model strategies are being used to achieve transformational results. A close look at these model Community Schools and districts shows that across racial, economic, and geographic diversities in this country, Community Schools work. As the new federal education legislation gives states greater power to implement Community Schools, we recommend learning from the strategies and mechanisms we provide in this report—both from research and from practice—to achieve transformational and sustainable Community Schools across the country.

As national attention increasingly focuses on the importance of children’s development in their early years, we have the responsibility—as community members, parents, educators, leaders, and policy makers—to do our part to ensure that young children have the opportunity to thrive. While there are a number of efforts in place to support young children and their families, many focus on one of two domains: either improving early childhood care or education or improving elementary education. Research suggests, however, that there is an essential third domain to attend to in our work to support young children: improving the quality and continuity of a child’s experience and her access to essential supports and services as she transitions from early childhood care or education into the elementary grades.