At ABC, we understand community schools not as a stand-alone program but as a data-driven strategy that schools adopt to transform how they operate and organize themselves. A school does not “have a community school program”; rather, it is a community school, and this shapes every fiber of how it runs, whom it engages, how it engages them, and the outcomes it achieves and celebrates.

Across the country and over the course of decades, the implementation of the community school strategy is tailored and varied to meet the unique priorities of individual communities. While those of us who are a part of this movement have a hard time fitting community schools into a neat box, we like this definition from the Community Schools Revolution publication that gets at the heart of what community schools are and have always unequivocally been about:

A community school is more than a place—it is a set of partnerships. Community schools are built on a foundation of mutually beneficial relationships between schools and communities. Partners from the public, private, and nonprofit sectors bring necessary expertise and assets to the school in areas including health and mental health, youth development, academic supports, and college and career readiness. Schools and their partners use resources in new ways to ensure that students and families achieve and that communities thrive.

In 2023, the Community Schools Forward taskforce assembled a series of resources that has given us and many other community school movements across the country shared language and coherent messaging around what community schools are. If you would like to learn more about the strategy, we recommend starting here.

Community school coordinators are vital to the success of any community school movement, carrying with them the heartbeat of the communities they serve. They are facilitators of transformative conversations within a school community and cultivate the spaces necessary for school community members to collaboratively plan and implement partnerships and initiatives that allow students to truly thrive in the classroom and beyond.

While it is impossible to convey all that they do, we often use this graphic when meeting with people new to the strategy to succinctly capture the work of a community school coordinator: