A Powerful Moment for Community Schools

 

Guest Blogger, Lisa Villarreal, Former Chair, Coalition for Community Schools

 From the moment we walked into the Los Angeles Convention Center for the Community Schools X Family Engagement 2022 Conference, I was filled with emotion. 3500 registered participants from every state in the union as well as several other countries. After 2+ years of pandemic lockdown and ugly politics, with public schools under the spotlight of national polarization, it was clear that the time for community schools strategy and phenomenon had absolutely come.

 The full service Community Schools movement in California and across America has truly arrived. But this is not a Community School of 1995, or even 2005, or I dare to say 2015. These are the community schools of the future, where Maslow's triangle of self-actualization is acknowledged as the original tepee of the Blackfoot tribe, where community is at the center. Where wraparound is a term of the past, and community is the operative term of today. Where community school collaboratives are building an infrastructure that will survive changes in principal leadership, superintendencies, policies and programs, because this is the future of how we are going to do schools.

 A community school that acknowledges and takes seriously the phrase "en loco parentis" because that is the legal charge for school boards and the schools they govern, -- to act in the best interest of children in place of the parents whom they are not with for six hours a day or more. An audacious charge, an audacious responsibility that the community does not take lightly, an idea whose time is simultaneously as old as the concept of public schools in America, and as new as the incredible federal and state funding that have arrived for the work. A practice that focuses Not on Deficits to be addressed with services for disadvantaged populations, but creates the necessary conditions for learning so that students can truly thrive and succeed far beyond their families’ wildest dreams. This is the Community Schools Revolution: Building Partnerships, Transforming Lives, Advancing Democracy!