Community Schools

Advocating for students and families by offering them to an array of services that will open the doors to a better tomorrow through academic, physical, and emotional support before, after, and during school.

Community schools take a “whole-child” approach to supporting students’ educational and life success. This means that they pay explicit attention to students’ social and emotional development as well as their academic learning, recognizing that they are intertwined and mutually reinforcing. They provide and coordinate a range of on-site services and supports to overcome both academic and nonacademic barriers to students’ educational and life success. The mix of offerings can vary, since they are tailored to meet local needs, but some of the most common services and supports are mental health, tutoring, before & after school activities, and other academic supports. For families we offer parent education classes, technology training, nutrition programs and more.

Policy Principles

The following principles and practices, derived from research and the experience of successful schools, demonstrate how state and local policy can support schools in providing and coordinating integrated student supports:

• Avoid a “one-size-fits-all” or top-down approach by requiring a systematic needs assessment process that includes input by students, families, school staff, and community partners. This assessment then guides the development of strategic partnerships for integrated student supports and direct services.
• Support a full-time community school leader at each community school site who serves as a member of the school leadership team, leads the analysis of site needs and assets, and is responsible for developing, coordinating, and sustaining partnerships with service providers and organizing service delivery.
• Take a whole-child approach that provides customized, comprehensive, coordinated, and continuous services and resources to address students’ academic, social-emotional, health, and family needs.
• Provide funding for technical assistance and collaboration within and among schools and agencies.
• Technical assistance to support districts’ implementation of new technologies, a hub for identifying community resources, and a data infrastructure for tracking progress on a variety of outcomes and fostering shared accountability.

After-school, weekend, and summer programs provide academic instruction and are essential to schools’ capacity to support students’ academic growth, as well as to help them develop socially, emotionally, and physically.

Educators collaborate with community partners to provide well-structured learning activities during out-of-school time and summer, using school facilities and other community spaces. This approach makes clear that enriched learning time is the responsibility of both schools and communities. A few of our programs include:

Learn & Play Club
Students will learn Social Emotional Learning goals through positive connections with adults and peers.

Musical Programs and Performances
Access to learning Mariachi, Merengue, and Hip Hop to build students’ confidence. All instruments provided.

100 Mile Club
Students will engage in goal setting through the commitment of walking or running 100 miles.

S.L.E.D. (Students Leading Education)
Students will solve real world problems in their school communities through peer collaboration.

Baile Folklorico
Students will learn the art of folklorico through weekly beginner or advanced classes.

Enrolling in Before & After School Activities

Click HERE to Contact your Anaheim Succeeds! Leadership Assistant for more information!

Promoting interaction among families, administration, and teachers helps families to be more involved in the decisions about their children’s education while building relationships of trust and respect to address educational inequities.

Community schools prioritize meaningful and ongoing engagement of families and community members and establish the systems, structures, and supports to make it happen. Educators and other staff at community schools understand that engagement happens on a continuum—from partnering with parents to develop and promote a vision for student success, to offering courses, activities, and services for parents and community members, to creating structures and opportunities for shared leadership. Families and community members, for their part, feel welcome, supported, and valued as essential partners

Parents, students, teachers, principals and community partners work together to develop shared goals through site-based leadership teams and teacher learning communities.

Collaborative leadership and practices, the fourth pillar of community schools, provides the relational “glue” that connects and reinforces the other pillars, making it foundational and critical for the success of a community school strategy. By developing a shared vision and goals and creating participatory practices for distributing responsibilities, a community school leverages the collective expertise of all of its stakeholders. In many schools, collaborative leadership and practices are central to the work of the professionals in the building—teachers, administrators, nonteaching staff, and union leaders. Examples of this include professional learning communities, site-based teams charged with improving school policy and classroom teaching and learning, labor-management collaborations, and teacher development strategies, such as peer assistance and review.