The Future of Public Education is a Community School

Speaker 1 So because the thing that made this the fight for diet to me a model for for all of the communities to follow is it was a plan that was crafted out of love and community wisdom and partnership with academic expertise rooted in love. Right? So there were no low expectations in that plan. There were no, well, you know, these young people are go to jail anyway on that plan. And when I spoke at Diets graduation two years ago, I looked at them and I said, we loved you before we even knew you. We loved the idea of you. And and I want I want you to understand that, like, this is a labor of love. Like like, do you want a better world? If you want a better world, what are you prepared to do?

Speaker 2 Hello, and welcome to the Human Restoration Project Podcast. My name is Nick Hummington. Before we get started, I wanted to let you know that this episode is brought to you by our supporters. Three of whom are Timothy Fox, David Knuffle, and Corinne Greenblatt. Thank you so much for your ongoing support. This conversation started two years ago when I ran into Kelly McMahon at a summer conference. Kelly's a kindergarten teacher at Hoover Community School in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. And I was curious about what that label, community school, means in practice for teachers, students, and the community served by this new model in the area.

Speaker 3 My name is Kelly McMahon, and I'm originally from Manchester, Iowa, and UNI graduate in 2002. And I began my teaching career in Milwaukee Public Schools, and we had faced a mayoral takeover, challenge with, back in 2000 gosh, I wanna say it was 2009, beginning of two thousand ten. And in those conversations to defeat a mayoral takeover, the community school model emerged out of those conversations. And so when I moved back to Iowa in 2011, that was something I was following, what was happening with the community school model being added in Milwaukee and expanded and just kinda kept my hands on it, learning a little bit more about the model. And it's kind of funny because as I learned more and found out, like, how there was this institute going on in Milwaukee, I had already been pastoring my principal, and that just kind of like, oh, hey. Guess what? There's this great learning opportunity. We should go. So we, sent a team. I wanna say there were eight or nine of us. We had a parent. We had my principal, myself, another teacher, our superintendent, a school board member, a community partner. All so seven, eight of us went to Milwaukee to learn more about the community school model and left there and got the green light to adopt the model at Hoover. And that was back in 2000 seems so long ago. I think it was, like, back in 2017 2018, I think, was when we got the green light. We went to Milwaukee and got the green light to add the model at Hoover. So it just made a lot of sense. We had a lot of great community partners already working with Hoover, but it was disjointed. And so the model allowed with how you have this structure, this framework, you to be more intentional and also finding out what are the true barriers instead of us always making assumptions. Because I think we do a really great job as adults working in schools of making assumptions about what those barriers are. But also, more importantly, what are the assets that are within our community to help work together and problem solve and address those challenges for student success. And so the idea is really about you're not only lifting up the child and improving their learning outcomes, but you're lifting up the whole community. And you're empowering students and parents and community members to have a very active involvement and voice and decisions that are made right there in the school, and that school is truly the heart of that community.

Speaker 2 I've since learned that just because your kids attend Ames Community School District, for example, that doesn't mean they attend a community school. Kelly put me in touch with Dave Greenberg and Angelia Ebner, senior policy analysts and community schools program specialists at the National Education Association, and they've helped build and support thousands of community schools, as Angelia describes it, from coast to coast and border to border.

Speaker 4 Angelia Ebner. I was a local president in Arizona, in a really small district and, had the opportunity to work with some of our families, to try to improve the public school and what we are offering, in competition with some charters and privatization that was happening here in Arizona. Fast forward, I was working with NAU at the Arizona k twelve center and met the incredible stylings of Dave Greenberg and Kyle Surratt and really discovered that community schools was a national movement that was happening. We always joke. Nobody goes to school to be a community school coordinator or a principal at or an educator at. So what what does it look like? And it looks different in every location, and so I got to work with Dave and Kyle trying to figure out how we could best support folks from coast to coast, border to border as they were starting to unpack the community school strategy.

Speaker 5 So I learned about community schools when I was teaching high school history in New Mexico, And we initiated, along with many other partners throughout New Mexico, a statewide community school initiative in 2019. New Mexico passed a community school act and launched an additional 100 schools throughout the state. And then after, supporting those schools, I was able to come to NEA and support the work nationally in now we're working with places like California that just launched, 2,500 new community schools and Maryland, which has launched seven, eight hundred new community schools and and everywhere in between. So it's it's really an honor. Angelie and I feel like we have the best jobs in our building because we get to work for schools, that we really care about, and and we're not just having to play defense against all the dark and terrible things that are facing, public education today.

Speaker 2 And no exploration of the community schools model would be complete without including the story of sustainable community schools in Chicago. Just last year, mayor Brandon Johnson announced a near doubling of the number of community schools in the city, bringing that number to 36. I spoke with foundational community organizer, advocate, and elected Chicago Public Schools board member, G2 Brown, about how organizing for sustainable community schools defused the push by elected officials for school closures, privatization, and the charterization of Chicago Public Schools. For Jitu, the title of school board member may be new, but he's Chicago born and raised, and he's been organizing around education and all of its related issues since the nineties.

Speaker 1 I am G2 Brown, born and raised on on Chicago. Actually, raised on the South Side Of Chicago. Lived on the West Side since 2006. In Chicago, the, most African Americans lived on either the West Side or the South Side. I began working with young people in 1991, 1992 as a volunteer with the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization. Began to run youth leadership programs in several public schools, focusing on leadership development, black history, mentorship, and really built close relationships with a lot of teachers, learned based off administrators really pulling me closer to the school, like going to staff development meetings, having our curriculum be part of the students' grades. One principal gave me my own classroom, and I was meeting with young people, like, three days a week. This really gained a lot of insight in regards to how schools work, but then also the equity issues in Chicago public schools. I became the commune the community school coordinator at Chicago's first high school that was a community school, which is South Shore School of Entrepreneurship. I did that for about six years, from 1998 to maybe 2005, 2006. In 2006, I joined the the the staff of the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization as the education organizer. My path has been one of community organizing, not just around education issues, around youth investment, around fighting to save hospitals, you know, holding slumlords accountable for how they treat single citizens in senior homes, and I bring that energy to the school board. And the main reason I wanted to run, and when people ask me to, is because I recognize that for us to move things on this board, there's gonna have to be people that they can't take in the backroom and cut a deal with. Right? And and and I'm far from perfect, but one thing I am is sincere, and and people know my history. And so we we have a we have the majority of the voting's lot. We've been able to do some incredible things in this year, albeit with a lot of resistance.

Speaker 2 While there were just hundreds of community schools in The United States fifteen years ago, today there are over 5,000 and growing in nearly every state in the nation. One consistent refrain from every person I spoke with for this episode was that community schools are the future of public education and the alternative to narratives about failing public schools that favor privatization as a solution. I asked Dave and Angelia at the NEA about what makes a community school a community school, what makes them different from typical public schools, and why they work to address the challenges faced by our public education system.

Speaker 4 The idea of the community school model is that you have a voice. There is a space for students to help inform what's happening, for parents and caregivers to help inform, community members at large. And and community looks different in every location. If you're a rural district covering 200 miles or an urban core covering just a couple of miles. Right? It really does look different, and that's the beauty of the community school strategy is that we're looking at improvement that is informed by those that are closest to the work that is happening and also needs to happen, looking at assets, and looking at the priorities that we wanna disrupt. And when we are supporting our our buildings, our community schools throughout the country, Dave and I are encouraging folks to take a holistic approach to improvement, looking at the assets that can be leveraged from within to help disrupt priorities that have been identified and disrupt priorities in in a way that leads to transformation rather than continuing to try to plug the holes in the dam, if you will, really trying to look for ways to transform what's happening and get to a space where folks not only have opportunities available to them, but can access them and can make the most of what those opportunities are.

Speaker 5 Just to pick up on what you were sharing earlier, like, is a bit of a PR challenge with community schools and that the work the term community schools means a lot of different things to different people. So some people just think of it as like a, you know, a neighborhood school or a school in the in the neighborhood or the local school down the street. There's a lot of districts that have community schools in the name, but but just to pick up on what Angela said, like, the quick and dirty definition we use is that community schools transform it's a strategy to transform traditional public schools into neighborhood hubs that uplift the voices of students, staff, family, and community members to cocreate a vision for, their public education system in their neighborhood. And so when Angela is talking about disrupting, we're disrupting the type of education that has unfortunately existed for, since since the beginning of mass public education in the country that's focused less on the, human connection. And I that's why I love the this podcast, the human restoration project. It's there's a trend that's, again, existed for over a hundred years where the focus is not on what students, staff, and family, and community want, but really on a top down vision that's rooted in control and compliance and efficiency and sort of this idea of the banking model of education and how can we jam facts into kids' heads. So I think we're interrupting that paradigm to uplift the the voices of all interest holders and to kinda break down the wall between school as sort of like this institution set apart from community, break down the wall between schools and community to bridge with all the local assets and community resources that that exist in the neighborhood.

Speaker 4 Just one thing to add is that as we are really kind of at this pivotal moment in public education, just deciding who we want to help make the decisions, right, that best who we want to make the decisions about what's happening in our classrooms and how it's happening, what's happening at our school sites, how our school sites, to Dave's point, are functioning as a hub and what that means and just finding a way for folks to be able to be unapologetically and unapologetically unafraid to share their voice and to help meet those needs, but really understand that community schools is not a deficit strategy. It's not a deficit model. It is looking about the strengths. It is looking to the strengths that we all possess and how we bring those forward. There's so many opportunities and so many stories that we can lift up. We've had the privilege of working with sites since 2016, 2017 and documenting the work that's been happening. For one instance, you know, like, looking at teacher shortage. Right? It's definitely a thing. It's not a shortage of qualified folks, but it's a shortage of folks that are willing to work in these conditions, and teachers' working conditions are our students' learning conditions. So how do we go about improving those knowing that there's a finite amount of funding available or support available? And so one key element of the community school strategy is the needs and assets assessment or assets and needs assessment that folks conduct to really bring those elements that Dave spoke to to the forefront, to bring the strengths, to bring the needs, to to identify priorities and collaboratively move forward with those, on those elements. And so we've seen in places where community school strategy is done well and is truly embracing a collaborative model, we see that there is a greater retention of educators within a building or within a system. There's also folks that really do want to move from maybe the educator to a systems leader or to a site leader, right, and stay connected to that collaborative process because they see this as a way of doing things differently rather than parachuting in experts from outside who may not be as connected or as invested. And then we also are seeing since COVID, everyone has had a huge focus on student attendance. And in our community schools, we continue to see improved attendance, and we can tell you that the common denominator tends to be relationships. It looks different for every site. We can't tell you what carrot or what's still, like, what punishment, what reward, what thing is working because those don't work. But what does work is deeply connecting with families and students and having it be a relationship where they feel comfortable reaching out to say, hey. My student's gonna be absent for part of the day. They'll be there the second half of the day or making that effort to get them there. Also, in some districts, up in the in the Midwest area, we've seen secondary bus routes go into practice. Right? Things of that nature where folks need to make a call or be in communication with one another for those systems improvements to actually have impact. And so those are those are two big disruptions that we tend to see with community schools.

Speaker 5 I would a 100% echo what Angelia shared in that community schools work all across the country in these different contexts, rural, urban, East Coast, West Coast, Midwest, everywhere in between because they are customized and locally driven based on the assets and and needs of each individual community. So, like, that phrase, you've seen one community school, you've seen one community school, is, is so important because it is locally driven and through the needs and asset assessment, really reflective of the different contexts of every community and every state. And so just to add to the examples that Angelia shared, like in in Anaheim, you know, we recently we all know that immigration has been a big challenge, for a lot of communities, especially border communities. And it came out as something that a lot of students and families were thinking about in the needs and asset assessment of some of the schools in Anaheim, secondary school district. And so they brought that directly into the classroom. The teachers had students do soapbox speeches about the immigration system, research the immigration system. And so taking concerns that are being voiced by students, staff, family, and community and and directly, making them part of the the school curriculum has been shown to be incredibly effective in engaging students and making school more relevant. And that's one of the kind of secret ingredients to why the community school strategy is so effective in all these different contexts that you named.

Speaker 2 So what does this look like on the ground for Kelly as a teacher leader at Hoover Community School? And how did Hoover manage the transition from a typical public school to the community school model, growing community partnerships and transforming themselves into a neighborhood hub? It's really like a strategy

Speaker 3 that is focused on school improvement as well as community improvement. So we have these six pillars that guide our work. Those pillars include a positive learning environment, high quality curriculum, extended learning opportunities, shared decision making. And then on top of it, there are these four mechanisms that could drive our work. And those and that's the heart of it. Because you could say, like, the six pillars, they align very well with, like, a Marzano structural framework. But the it's the four mechanisms that really drive the work, which is having a community school coordinator who works with parents, students, and staff, completing your needs based assessments to identify what those challenges are, asset mapping, identifying all the assets that everyone brings into the community, staff, parents, students, community organizations, and partners, neighbors in the community, And then the shared decision making power, like, teams that make those decisions. They go through the needs assessments, they identify problems, and then they figure out what assets you can tap into to address those. And everyone like, that shared decision making is, like, everyone is empowered, and there's no more assuming. Like, we dive deep. We have we have a survey, but then we also have follow-up conversations. So, like, our staff just recently, there was, like, one something about communication. And so we had to do a follow-up because we needed to know more about the communication breakdown. So you're diving you try to get, like, 80% of everyone to complete the initial survey questions, and then you go deeper with every group to find out really what it is. And then you, like, you do your, like, fishbone, and what are those root causes and all that. So it's a lot of educational science, and it's just plan to review like, study review, like, over and over again. And then and the best part is, like, everyone's empowered to be a part of these problem solving teams. I think probably one of the biggest shift was needing to step back and realize that we didn't know everything that we knew. And hearing, you know, like, some of the challenges and that were, wow, like, you just didn't know because it's not what we shared. So learning some of those things, but then also recognizing and I think the biggest mind shift is it's very easy to work in a title one school with a large population of students that qualify for English language services to have a very deficit mindset about the communities and the families that you're working with and shifting that mindset to really think about all of the amazing, resources that they bring in and to our schools every day, and how can we tap into those talents that they have that we don't know because we weren't ever having those conversations. I think that was probably one of the biggest things was just shifting that mindset. When we first adopted, there was also this idea that, well, our coordinator, they do the community school work. That's not us. But it's like, but no. Like, it's all of us. We're all the Hoover Community School. Like, if not one person does it and the rest of us just go about like, we all have to have a say in making these decisions and working together. And we all have something to bring to the table, that can benefit the whole group. So that was another challenge that we had. And then I think the conversations are different when you have, like, your PLC conversations. They're much more focused in on diving really deep in and, like, again, like, are there ways that we can bring in a community to help some partner to help in with, you know, bringing this? Is there something like, you know, when you're talking about you know, we're talking about comprehension last night. Like, where are those challenges? What do we need to do different? Because, obviously, part of comprehension is tapping into what type of prior knowledge you have already. Like, how can we help build up some? Know, how can we enrich what we're doing? So I think some conversations are very different. In some ways, my day to day job isn't any different, which some people, like, think that, oh, because, you know, you do this. Like, you know, we have this title of our community school, but it's not it's a strategy. It's our approach of doing things versus this bells and whistle. Because what Hoover looks like is gonna look different than what a school down the street that has a community school is gonna look like because it's all about what that particular community needs. Some of our partnerships are helping provide transportation for students to and get from school. Some partnerships are also focused on act extracurricular activities that our students didn't have opportunities to. So, there's a big soccer league here in Cedar Rapids, and a lot of our families are all about the soccer. The kids love soccer. That's their sport. And so they, a partner is helping us be able to get our kids into that big soccer league, and they are phenomenal soccer players. So some of that is also, you know, providing some after school tutoring. Some of it is also we have a partnership, which is just really, really incredible trying to, like, stabilize housing. So there is a church that helps support, that they will help with the deposit for an apartment for a family that has, become homeless. And then once they're stable and they're moved into the a place to live for that deposit, then, you know, they pay back that, you know, that deposit money. So that way, then they can, you know, help the next person. But it's, you know, it's not like, oh, we make I need it, like, next month. Like, it's over a tiered, you know, so many months that they have to pay that back. So, you know, that's something like, you know, who would have thought that we can help, you know, stabilize a housing and find a partner that would help, you know, because down payments are on rental properties are very expensive, whether it's an apartment or a house. So that's, you know, a unique one. We have a health fair or not a health fair. We have this resource center. So we have various organizations to help out with health and financial planning that come once a month for families to come and tap into those. We have Iowa Legal Aid in our building twice of twice a month, maybe. I think it's twice a month. So it all very depends on, you know, what needs we're trying to help address, what those community partners are. We have another church that basically runs our food pantry for us. They will we have families that the parents work third shift, so they can't come themselves. So they will do deliveries to the homes for the from the food pantry, which is amazing. So there's just a wide variety of different I don't even think I even know half of the partners that we have and what they all do because, we've really just expanded a lot of our different partnerships.

Speaker 2 For g two Brown in Chicago, the growth of sustainable community schools is tied to racial justice movements fighting to improve the lives of black people and communities in Chicago. That includes housing, policing, medical care, and education. As g two explains, the early fight for community schools was the antidote to school closures and privatization pushed by elected officials and outsiders who saw racial inequities as an opportunity for profits.

Speaker 1 Now one of the things that happened in the process of winning an elected school board and then also winning the mayor's seat is that we pushed for Chicago to become a sustainable community school district because we understood that everywhere where the charter industry has taken root, the black population has plummeted. Every city without exception. And so the charter expansion is really about remaking urban landscapes. Right? And so we were very clear that we want to invest in neighborhood schools by providing them the opportunity to become a sustainable community school with the high school as the hub of a sustainable community school village, which includes the feeder school. So there's a lot of excitement. We added we just added 17 new sustainable community schools this year. There's a fierce resistance to what we're doing from the privatization community, because they've been using the Chicago Public Schools budget, which is $10,000,000,000, as a pig's truck for the last forty years. Right? Enriching themselves, ignoring inequities, shutting down the you know, they've closed over a 161 schools in Chicago. It's not just the 50 schools that Rahm Emanuel closed. Over a 160 schools have closed in the city. And never dealing with the fact that the the big problem of public education in Chicago is that children that were black and brown had a completely different reality than children that were white, which is why none of those schools closed, because parents are satisfied. And they should be satisfied, but not at the expense of sacrificing, you know, other children's schools, other community schools. So we know that the community school model works. There's boatloads of research that that that supports that fact. One of the the best pieces is from the Learning Policy Institute with Linda Darling Hammond in her group. They've studied community schools in New York. They've studied community schools in Cincinnati. They've studied community schools in California. So we know that this model works, and it's really simple. Communities know what they need. Schools are community institutions. You just have to put you have to have the political will to do it. And what we're faith what we're we're seeing now, especially today with the stripping of the Voting Rights Act, the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, understand that there is an element you know, there is an unrecon an unreconciled disease in America that has never diminished, that has never been healed, that has never been confronted, and that's racism. Racism is interwoven and an essential component of America's DNA. And because there's never been any accountability for the evil that's been done, there hasn't really been any transformation. So now we are seeing the erosion of voting rights just like we've seen the sabotage of public education. And so in order for us to truly, you know, achieve what what what one could say is a real democracy, we have to be honest about the landscape that we're dealing with. Right? So let me give a little history around just specifically the sustainable community schools model. So when I was an organizer with the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization, my executive director, Jay Travis, I was doing a project where I was I was on the local school councils, the local school governing body at Dyer High School for ten years. Arne Duncan had just closed a school called Inglewood, which is in a a a community to the south of where we are, and they and and dumped a thousand children in four different high school. These young people come from different neighborhoods. Violence exploded at school. So, of course, we had to and and and a lot of those children came to die. So, Jay, I was do I was doing something called the school alignment process while I was meeting with all the fetish schools and trying to and and building vertical and horizontal curriculum alignment, and and and also ways for the schools to connect. So local school councils at the different schools training together, parent advisory councils the different schools training together, high school students mentoring the elementary students, just trying to build connection because as Chicago was tran was transitioning into a choice district, a portfolio district, the notion of feeder schools was disappearing. Right? And so my executive director was like, what you're doing is good, but they had just come from a meeting where they saw the plans for the Obama presidential center, and it was in the same location with Diode High Schools. Mhmm. What Diode High School was. So she was like, they're coming for this school. You you've gotta build a community vision. And so I knew that the the full service community school model is good, but what it tends to do is limit your the the community's input to after school activity. It was my responsibility to sort of develop a model that actually looked at curriculum, that looked at wraparound supports, that looked at teacher supports, that looked at how to create a student centered school climate. So I'm using that word instead of discipline. Right? Because to me, saying student discipline is already a negative connotation. But if you say a stewy sentence to climate, you're also talking about what type of leadership development opportunities should be available to young people in schools. The human development, and that includes how to hold them accountable when they make mistakes. Right? And so and then also, what what is what is, like, real parenting community transformative parenting community engagement look like? And finally, what does an inclusive school leader look like? A a school leader, a principal that that values the the input and the wisdom and the skills of the entire school community and does not operate as a dictator but operates as a master facilitator. Right? And so these were the six pillars. My responsibility was to really build excitement. So I talked to a few thousand people in the Bronzeville community, and we built a it was the first iteration of the plan. It was called the Bronzeville Global Achievers Village. Was dying in '6 and was feeding students. So we went back to the community, we shared the plan, people were excited, then we developed a design team.

Speaker 2 Schools like Diet High School, thoroughly documented in Eve Ewing's book Ghosts in the Schoolyard, were at the center of this fight and have since become a centerpiece of the sustainable community schools movement.

Speaker 1 Now in the midst of this, despite the fact that Dyer had the largest increase of students going to college in all the Chicago public schools, Had the largest decrease in arrest and suspensions arrest and suspensions. We had just won the ESPN Rising Award, so we got a $4,000,000 renovation to our athletic facility. And the next year, they voted to phase our school out. By phase out, that means they stopped taking freshmen, right, until no children were left. And they were bribing children to get them to Neve early. We'll give you, you know, free bus pass. We'll we'll let you get into this school. We'll let you get into that school. And and so a lot of children left until the last year. It was 13 children. All 13 of them were COCO youth leaders. They were youth leaders with COCO. They refused to leave, and they were called the diet 13. So these young people are the ones that really energized. The young people are the ones that really energized to fight for diet high school. So them fighting back, the earlier expressions of them I'm going back to, like, 2012. These young people filed Title VI civil rights complaints with the US Department of Education. They did press conferences. They did actions. They, you know, that they these young people were like again, these were these were Coco youth, so they were already politicized and and not parroted. They had their own analysis. They understood that what was happening to them was wrong, and they inspired the community. So moving forward to the plan, the community wanted this plan. We had to develop the design team. The design team, using the five at that time, five pillars, the design team pretty much designed the plan from eight in the morning to 03:30 for diet and all six of his feeder schools, and the community began to fight for that plan. Rahm Emanuel resisted. We stopped going to the school board, we just started targeting the mayor. And, we did everything from take over his press conferences to chain ourselves to the statue outside of his office, march 700 people to his house. But despite all of that, it was having minimal effect on him. So as a community organizer, we had to say, okay. This is our target. He's a person that can give us what we want. How do we move them? And so we realized that because Rahm Emanuel was corporate and his power didn't come from his control of the alderman, it came from his corporate money, We had to do something that would make Goldman Sachs, that would make the New York Times, that would make those type of interests, The Wall Street Journal, question you. And so that's when the idea of a hunger strike as a tactic came up. So we we had done all these town hall meetings. The community wanted the plan. Different people that was looking at the plan said it was one of the best academic plans they'd ever seen. American Education Research Association, American Federation of Teachers, Linda Darling Hammond. And people were really like, this this why aren't you supporting this? This is an activated community that has a beautiful vision for their schools. And CPS said that they they pretty much said, we're not gonna support the plan. So on 08/17/2015, 12 of us launched the hunger strike to save Diet High School. The hunger strike lasted thirty four days, and we won. Dyer is the first closed school because by that time, the school had actually closed. The 13 students had graduated, but it was reopened as an open enrollment neighborhood school with with $16,000,000 in new investments. And last year, they won a state championship in basketball. So, it was a huge victory, and it it really, to me, killed school closings in Chicago. Elected officials were coming in office, they knew that this was a third rail issue. And but it also helped to energize the fights on elected school boards because as we starved in Washington Park, all of Chicago had to look at this fact that that that we lived in two different cities. There was one reality for us, and there was a reality for people that didn't look like us.

Speaker 2 While the impact on Chicago communities and families seems self evident, community schools face the uphill climb of how to measure and communicate that success and the impact of their model in the era of great schools and school rankings that look at a narrow slice of test scores, graduation rates, and AP enrollment.

Speaker 3 It does, but we have a lot of families that they start out at Hoover, and because of everything that we do at Hoover, and they do feel like Hoover is so important to their family that they permit in. So a couple years ago, I had a student that moved to Marion, which is a good twenty minutes away from my school Yeah. Midyear. And the parents, like, no. We're staying at Hoover, so they permitted in. We do have families that permitted in from surrounding districts as well, not just within our own school district, but other school districts are permitting into our school because it's a special place. When people come and they sub or they visit, they're like, this is just a very special place. It's not what you think about and you envision when you think of a school that is, you know, 97% free and reduced and, you know, over, like, 45% of students receiving English language services, you know, were predominantly nonwhite students. Like, it's not what you see. And I was actually at a conference, and they're like, you know, who all teaches at a title one school? And I'm like, you know, raising their hand on who's all whatever. And I was just like, was the only one not raising my hand. And they're like, well, what like, why? I'm like, well, my school has adapted the community school model. So we've been working. Like, we have the best staff retention rate in the district. We have, like, the best student absenteeism rate in the district. And that wasn't what my school was like when I first started. It was a very transient population. We have very our population is very much stabilized. Kids that we have in kindergarten, most of them are there when they leave for fifth grade. So it's very powerful to see, like, how, yes, the community partners are there, but, like, you can't just the community partners are not enough. Like, there's more to it than just having community partners. Sending home food every week with kids is not enough. Like, it's also what we do with those six pillars, like how they all work together. And that was one of the biggest eye opening things when we went to Milwaukee to learn more about the community school model. Their their visual is very good in it because it's Milwaukee, and we know what Milwaukee is known for, this finest beer. Right? And so they had a visual about how like, the best of the best where you get the the foam of the beer, like, best. I'm not a beer drinker, so I don't know this. So I'm taking it for a word. But it's like, what do those schools do that get the best results? Like, why is that sets them apart? And that's what we're doing is those things, which is the strategy. You know, we see lots of families that, you know, with the financial literacy planning classes that they can take advantage of, you know, getting their first homes. We see a lot of students. You know, the big thing was just seeing my well, they were preschoolers to begin with and then first grades, but now my kindergarteners, seeing them still at Hoover when they were fifth graders. My first year, I was one of, like, nine new teachers. And now it's like, oh, we don't have any staff turnover unless they're retiring or they're moving away to be closer to family or for a job. You know? And that there is huge because, you know, as you're having that revolving door of staff, it's really hard to make a dent in improving student outcomes because you're constantly like it's just new people in there. And I think that's been one of the nice things. Students are very happy. You know, they're healthy. They want to be at school. Parents come in, and they greet you. They get they'll give you hugs. Like, conferences are just so thankful. And, you know, it's just I think probably the best thing to hear, though, is whenever you hear about somebody being in the school and they say, wow, like, this is just such a special place. I've never other schools aren't like this. Like, you know, because as I said when I first started, the reputation that my school had was not a good reputation. And we definitely had challenges, and it's just really nice to I think that's my biggest thing, is that people want to come to my school to work. People want their child to be at our school. They choose to permit them, and a lot of them choose to permit in to keep them at our school. So I think that's the biggest thing that came to fruition because that's what I always wanted. Like, it's a great place. These are great kids. These are great families. It's a great neighborhood, like, lifting it up and, like, letting it shine. We need to do better about that for all of our schools, but definitely those that are in demographics are more like mine. They're being down too much.

Speaker 4 We have been trying to gather data anecdotally and also through interviews from our community schools over the past several years. Every spring, we try to host an interview followed up with some survey questions to collect qualitative and quantitative data about how the strategy is impacting, specific sites around the country. And so we've compiled what we are learning about what kind of post needs and asset or post assets and needs assessment, what can a community school do to really come together collaboratively around developing priorities and developing continuous improvement or, you know, using improvement science principles to to move forward and take action around the priorities that have been identified. And what do those rapid cycles of improvement look like? We're no longer looking at one hundred and eighty day school years. Right? We're not just going to hang on for summative data or those satellite data pieces to come back, but we're looking at four to six week implementation cycles of improvement to see if we are moving the needle in some way or if, like, the mile markers tell us we're moving in the right knee right direction to move the needle. So we have a guide that we have been developing with practitioners for the past three years. And there's also a collection at the end of that guide, to be honest with you, Nick, that talks about the different things that we're looking at. And one of the things that Dave and I are really excited about right now is, kind of this new focus on community based learning or community centered learning and how that's starting to impact what teachers see or what educators see as a possibility within the teaching and learning space, how students are interacting with the teaching and learning space, the involvement of parents and community members to better inform. And so when we are thinking about how we wanna share the message of how we get better, we are constantly having our schools think about what was what was the current state of the of the priority or of the asset that you wanted to, you know, better understand through this model. What was it that you did to take action around that? What what were those actions? And then what are the qualitative and quantitative pieces that came out of that action? And knowing that for some folks, they want something as close to a white paper as possible. That's not what we're doing here, but they want as much data as possible. And then other folks, how do we create the infographic to drive home the impact that this has holistically on students, on educators, on families, and our communities? And so really looking at ways that we measure this. And like Dave said, if you've seen one community school, you've seen one community school. So I can't say that community school a is gonna look like b is gonna look like c, d, or e, but there are elements that are showing improvement. And so it's being able to share with our network of community schools across the country what we're doing, how we're doing it, and continuing to use the model to uplift the new pieces that we want to continue to seek improvement around.

Speaker 5 I love love that, and and, second that what what Angelia said. I would say two things in addition. One, I I really feel like we're so grateful to have evaluation partners like the Learning Policy Institute, we talked about Rand, who know how to do deep, rigorous research as of because you can do so many things with numbers. Right? And we see that, being manipulated all the time. But we have folks that are doing real serious studies of community schools and showing results like in the LPI study that, you know, community schools are reducing chronic absenteeism by 30% more than their similar schools and reducing suspensions by 15% more and that the results are concentrated with traditionally marginalized students and families. So we're we have partners that are showing the evidence that this is working. But to, I think, what Angela is talking about and to your question, Nick, community schools give us the opportunity to think outside of just the traditional metrics that we've been using to assess educational progress because we know from No Child Left Behind and and a lot of the top down reforms that we've seen that when we just focus on reading and math scores, there's a whole slew of, unintended consequences around narrowing the curriculum. One study that I just read that blew my mind was I don't know if this is common knowledge, but schools were actually in the height of the no child left behind craze. They were kind of carbo loading their kids in the cafeteria meals, like serving them more pasta and carbs the day before the test to try to, you know like, every shortcut that schools could take to boost these scores, they would do. And that's not the kind of education system we want. We parents and students loudly have said they don't just wanna test prep, drill, and kill style education that's not really it's not really learning. It's not preparing students to be democratic, contributors to our society. So community schools gives us the opportunity to think more holistically about what success looks like and to bring in the voices of students, staff, family, community members to define what success looks like for them and their community and their context.

Speaker 2 Now if you've made it this far and wanna know more about how to transition your school to a community school, Kelly has a few lessons to share from that transition at Hoover, and the NEA has resources to support you. I've included links in the show notes along with Dave and Angelia's emails if you want to reach out directly.

Speaker 3 Well, the first lesson learned was when you're the only school doing the model in your district, you really don't know what you're doing, and there's no one else to really piggyback. So it's nice that we've had some resources along the way to help us through the NEA. So, like, our first two coordinators, you know, the first one, we didn't know what, like, we should be happy, like, was all going on, you know, and had really great ideas, really put some nice things in place with certain like, our food pantry definitely shifted from the backpack cone to, nope, you come in, making sure that we had food that parents would want to actually eat and feed their children because very culturally diverse. And then like our second one, we redid our model and logo, just things. And now we're on our third one, and that's just those learning pages. It's okay to change your coordinator. You may not have the right fit to start with. So that's one big thing. Another thing is you have to really work to make sure that people aren't getting an idea. Well, that's their job. The the model is just this person. And I just like, really embracing that is all of us working together, that we're all the community school model, not just a person. The time, like, it's you know, the things don't shift, happen overnight. It's not a magic bullet where, you know, year one, you're gonna have these great, you know, things, and there can still be bumps in the road, you know, along the way. So not getting complacent because it's very easy to get complacent, but recognizing that it's gonna take time. They say that, you know, really in years five to seven after adopting the model, that's when you really start seeing the results taking off. And, you know, that's what our trajectory has been. You know, the first couple of years, we changed. I think within three years, we had three different coordinators, which was fine. We just didn't have the right person at that time. And so I think those are the big things.

Speaker 5 Well, this is definitely where we come in, Nick. We, Angelie, and I are so lucky to be able to support this work full time with NEA. And really, it is our jobs to support anyone around the country who's interested in starting the community school strategy, getting it off the ground, implementing it according to the research. We're really fortunate to be in a position where NEA has invested in a community school implementation institute that we colead where we can provide that kind of support. So folks can reach out to us, and we can help. We do presentations to raise awareness of what community schools is, raise awareness of the best practices, and then we support once a school has, like, a team of folks that understand the strategy or a district has a team, The idea, we encourage them to spread the word and raise more awareness among students, staff, family, and community members. And then when there's a critical mass of folks in the district who understand the strategy, who are engaged in it, then we provide support with creating a formal agreement with districts and students at family community groups to develop what we call, like, a a district wide steering committee or implementation team. And that's the group that really thinks about things like funding and, an application process for where what community schools, how what that looks like, who who should apply, where should resources be targeted, and what's the rollout strategy and plan, and how do we how do we define success. And those are all things that Angelia and I support districts and sites with across the country, and we have lots of different, opportunities for learning. And we just encourage folks to connect with us, and it's an open application process. It's on the NEA website. You can also email us. We'd be happy to share our email addresses. And this is what we do get to do all day.

Speaker 4 I appreciate Dave really framing what the fertile environment is for community school strategy, like a successful launch. Because, again, just a reminder, community school strategy is not a program. Dave and I are not gonna a binder in the mail and send anyone, you know, like, the guide to. This is gonna be something that is, developed with folks. So just continuing to start thinking about what are we doing with one another and not what are we gonna do to any group that we are serving through our public school, resources. And also on our, community school page on the NEA website, there's also a five step. So kind of highlights what Dave just kind of framed in a pictorial, like, just a few words, but kinda helps folks think through, what are those right next steps as you're looking to build, like Dave said, that that mass that critical mass around this around the strategy, around implementing this model in your local context.

Speaker 2 And finally, g two Brown sees the future of public education in the expansion of community schools as a bulwark against privatization regimes that push vouchers, school closures, and the charterization of our public school system.

Speaker 1 Since 1995, before No Child Left Behind, the corporate community had been setting up to take over of public education. Right? So Paul Vallis in Chicago put over a 160 schools on probation, began opening up magnet schools, selective enrollment schools, which poached the top performing students out of neighborhood schools. Then said, now your school's a failing. Auntie Duncan came in and and and yoked, you know, and and he began shutting down schools. Then Barbara Bennett came in, and she dealt with some people who viewed as the death blow. But all of that, vouchers, the expansion of charter school, online school, all of these is someone else's vision. We maintain that sustainable community schools, which basically means community control of schools. That's all it means. Sustainable community schools is the future of public education. If we unite around that idea around the continent, we don't want outsiders in our communities telling us what's best for our children. Ain't nobody gonna love you better than you. And so why would we hand our children over to to to to these interests that have that have proven undoubtedly, they've proven we can't trust them. But when what I learned is that people will fight for what they help to build. So people that were not activists, people that were not organizers, mamas, grandmamas, fathers, you know, people got involved in that fight for diet because our superpower is nobody goes to miss Jones and mister Jones and says, what's your vision of a better world and mean it and mean it. And so I believe that this is something that we need to unite around all of us that are organizing around education justice.

Speaker 6 Thank you again for listening to our podcast at Human Restoration Project. I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to start making change. If you enjoyed listening, please consider leaving us a review on your favorite podcast player. Plus, find a whole host of free resources, writings, and other podcasts all for free on our website, humanrestorationproject.org. Thank you.