“Community Schools” is a concept with a thousand potential implementations/ iterations, and especially so during the pandemic. Which is a very good thing, because “school” can be done so very many different ways, and we need to keep learning about what works and what doesn’t for various local contingencies.
Huge school bureaucracies across the US are not known for continual remaking of themselves, yet the world doesn’t stand still, employment and the economy changes, communities change demographically, and learning needs and M.O. change as well along with that. Schooling needs to remake itself continually to match those changes, or it becomes part of the problem and not part of the solution.
For example, some communities encompass areas with many needs that can be addressed through organizing a local community into a pool of resources. Some of those resources may be Federal and State and Local assistance for needs commonly found in poverty demographics.
Parents can contribute, but also receive services, such as healthcare, family support, meal support, after school support, pre natal support, addiction programs, violence in the home programs, read to your kids programs, etc. etc. And those programs can be designed in ways to support learning in those communities as well. This model fits a community such as Las Cruces, with it’s many neighborhoods of low income.
A very different demographic also exists, where parents and families have “adequate and above” income and the access to various services and resources that comes with that. Yet schooling and learning needs for families are still complex, with regional and local neighborhood iterations. One resource is notably lacking: parental free time, because of the two career family structure. Most of these career jobs require much more than 40 hours per week, work continues into the evening hours, and spills over into weekends as well.
Yet learning needs family support, and that can be pooled to better fit time limitations. One example of such a learning community is the University Cooperative School in Seattle. Their promo video is presented below, kudos to Kris, whose grandson attends.