Summary

• Community schools integrate academic, health, and family support services within schools, creating a coordinated system to support student success.

• In D.C., community schools are currently supported by OSSE’s Community Schools Incentive Initiative and DCPS’s Connected Schools model.

• Research shows community schools improve attendance, academic performance, and reduce suspensions.

• Effectively scaling community schools requires investments in infrastructure, things like centrally funded coordinators, shared data systems, family governance, and leadership training.

Students bring their whole lives to school. Their health. Their aspirations. Their doubts… Teachers see this every day. They do their best. But there’s only so much one person can handle between bells… 

Community schools are built around a simple idea: bringing the support students and families need into the school building, instead of making families chase help all over the city. This can include things like mental health services, food access, after‑school programs, internships, and career opportunities—all connected through the school. 

In D.C., this approach is already happening. One way is through the Community Schools Incentive Initiative, a grant program run by the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) which currently funds seven community school partnerships serving 16 DC public and public charter schools. These schools work with local nonprofits and community groups to connect students and families to services like health care, homework help, and family resources in one trusted place.  Another is through District of Columbia Public Schools’ investment in its Connected Schools Model, which supports 18 schools in being resource hubs for their students and families.

On January 21, the D.C. State Board of Education brought together a panel of educators, community partners, and researchers to talk about what this looks like day‑to‑day and what it takes to make community schools work well. A key question in D.C. right now is how to keep funding stable for the staff who coordinate these services, so families can count on consistent support and familiar faces at their schools year after year.

The panel brought together people who have done this work in different cities: 

• Julia Baez, CEO of Baltimore’s Promise, helped pass that city’s community schools’ policy;
• Monique Baker, Program Director at Communities In Schools of the Nation’s Capital, currently oversees the successful implementation of her program’s community schools model in nine schools across D.C.; 
• Joane Etienne, Director of Boston’s Community Hub Schools, oversees 20 community hub schools in her school district;
• Anna Maier, Senior Policy Advisor and Researcher at the Learning Policy Institute; and 
• José Muñoz, President of the Education Commission of the States, previously led community school work in Albuquerque. 

The Board also received written testimony from Joline Collins, Regional Director at the Institute for Educational Leadership.

A community school is more than just a program; it’s a strategy.

When people hear “community school,” they often picture a building with extra services: a clinic, a food pantry, tutoring, maybe some after-school programs. Those things matter. But the panelists pushed back on that framing. A community school is a way of organizing how a school relates to its neighborhood, so that health, family support, and academics get coordinated together rather than handled in silos. Etienne put it succinctly in her written testimony: What makes Boston’s Hub Schools effective isn’t the menu of services but the relationships and the culture of shared responsibility. In her words, “Staff pick up students when transportation falls short…teachers call families to solve problems together…These actions are not written into any grant…They flow from a shared belief that our children are worthy of extraordinary effort.” That belief has to be baked into how a school operates, not bolted on.

Community schools are shown to be effective at improving attendance.

Chronic absenteeism has become one of the most urgent challenges in public education. Nationally, nearly one in four students missed 10% or more of school days in 2024–25, still well above where things were before the pandemic. When asked what’s keeping D.C. students out of school, Baker was specific: transportation, safety, younger siblings who need to be dropped off first, untreated health needs like vision problems. These non-academic barriers can compound, and schools can’t solve them alone.

Community schools, however, take a different approach to meeting the needs of the whole child. A September 2025 evaluation of California’s statewide initiative (the largest community schools’ investment in the country) found a 30% greater reduction in chronic absence at participating schools compared to similar schools without the program. That translated to more than 5,000 additional students showing up regularly in just the first year. RAND’s evaluation of New York City found reductions of seven to eight percentage points, with even larger gains for students in temporary housing and Black students.

Baker shared data from Communities In Schools here in Washington, D.C. Of the students they worked closely with last year, 81% met or made progress toward their attendance goals. That kind of improvement comes from relationship-based outreach and actually addressing the barriers, not from stricter consequences.

Community schools are also shown to have positive effects on performance.

The California evaluation is significant because it’s the first large-scale test of whether this model can work statewide, not just in a handful of schools. The findings were strong. Test scores improved as if students benefited from 43 additional days of math instruction and 36 additional days in reading, and suspension rates fell 15 percent. For Black students, the effects were even larger, with test scores improving as if they had received 130 additional days of math instruction and 151 in reading.

What explains results like these? Part of the answer is straightforward. A student who is hungry, sleep-deprived, or worried about an unmet health need has less mental bandwidth for academics; when those basic needs are met, they can focus on learning. Community schools reduce students’ cognitive loads by bringing supports directly to where they already are. 

But research suggests something deeper is also at play. In a landmark study of Chicago schools, researchers found that relational trust, the quality of social bonds among teachers, students, and families, is one of the strongest predictors of school improvement. Schools with high trust saw gains in reading and math; schools with weak trust saw virtually none. Community schools build this trust by design. Coordinators conduct home visits, partners become familiar faces, and families participate in real decisions. Over time, students come to feel that the school knows them and is genuinely invested in their success. That sense of belonging makes them more likely to show up, persist, and engage.

Sharing an example from his time in Albuquerque, José Muñoz further illustrated how the community school model can significantly improve a school’s performance. One school in his local area had 91% student mobility, he said, meaning that almost every student left or transferred during the year. Three years after implementing a community school model with coordinated city and county support, mobility dropped to 38%, and the school went from an F to a B on state grades. Baez reported similar patterns in Baltimore, where chronic absence rates at established community schools are significantly lower than at comparable schools without the model.

So, if the model is this promising, the key question becomes less “does it work?” and more “what does it take to make it work?” at scale.

What does a good-faith effort to implement a community school look like?

The panelists were clear that community schools don’t scale through good intentions. They require system-level infrastructure.

Stable funding came up repeatedly. Maryland’s Blueprint for Maryland’s Future embeds community school money in the regular education budget rather than making schools compete for grants. High-poverty schools are designated as community schools and receive funding for a coordinator, a health care practitioner, and wraparound services tied to a needs assessment. The state now has over 600 community schools, up from 358 just a few years ago, and 152 in Baltimore alone.

A full-time coordinator, funded through central office—not the school’s—funds, is essential. Every panelist came back to this point. This is the person who runs needs assessments, manages partnerships, tracks whether supports are actually reaching students, and follows up when someone falls through the cracks. Collins’ written testimony cited research showing about $7 returned for every dollar invested in a coordinator, mostly through reduced duplication and improved attendance. But how the role is funded matters too. In Boston, Etienne explained, coordinators are paid centrally rather than out of individual school budgets. That treats coordination as a system responsibility, not something each school has to fight to keep every budget cycle. The position costs roughly $90,000 to $98,000 plus benefits, comparable to other school leadership roles. Cities that have made this investment are seeing returns.

Shared data systems are another piece. Baez described the infrastructure that Baltimore’s Promise is building to connect education, health, youth development, and workforce data across agencies. Without that kind of visibility, coordinators work blind. They can react to individual students in crisis, but they can’t see the patterns that would let them intervene earlier.

Family governance matters more than family “engagement.” Collins’ testimony described Baltimore’s citywide steering committee, which includes voting seats for students and parents — not advisory roles, actual decision-making power over how the strategy gets implemented. In Boston, schools receive funding that requires participatory budgeting with families. Muñoz made the point directly by expressing how the community’s voice matters when community decisions are co-owned.

Leadership buy-in can’t be assumed. Etienne noted that the strategy can be supported or undermined by school leadership, and the work doesn’t survive principal turnover if only one person understands the model. Boston invests in sending full leadership teams to trainings together, so shared understanding gets built across the school.

Final Reflections

The evidence on community schools has gotten stronger over the past few years. California’s evaluation, in particular, offers something earlier research couldn’t — an example that this model can work at scale, across hundreds of schools, with measurable effects on attendance, discipline, and achievement. The most important question about community schools in D.C., then, isn’t whether they work; it’s how to create an infrastructure that sustains current community schools and expand models across the District.  

Our January panel, whose members spoke from around the country, offered plenty of insights. Investing in the conditions that maximizes community schools’ effectiveness, they said, are critical – things like centrally-funded school coordinators, cross-agency data systems, and governance structures where families have real power to make policy decisions and help adapt to changing community needs.