A February report from the Learning Policy Institute studies the community school initiative in West Kern County to measure its impact on rural communities. While rural schools have advantages like close-knit communities, students and families also face challenges related to academic achievement, socioeconomic difficulties, administrative capacity, teacher recruitment and retention and inconsistent access to services, according to the report, Community Schools in Rural California: Leveraging Shared Resources in West Kern County.
To address many of these issues, rural leaders are turning to community schools, an evidence-based school improvement strategy where educators, families, students and the community work together to strengthen the conditions necessary for student learning.
“To do this, community schools organize in- and out-of-school resources, supports, and opportunities to enable student success and well-being, typically instituting a range of whole child educational approaches that support academic, social, and emotional development,” the report states. “Systems-level supports that enable community school development, continuous improvement, and sustainability play an important role, particularly when seeking to support community schools at scale.”
Working together
Six rural school districts make up the West Kern Consortium for Full-Service Community Schools — four K-8 and two high school districts, one comprehensive and one alternative. The consortium reaches more than 3,800 students all together.
Formerly established by three elementary districts in 2018, the consortium used funding from the federal Full-Service Community Schools Grant program to kickstart the initiative. By 2022, the consortium had expanded to include all members through the support of the California Community Schools Partnership Program. The consortium’s vision is grounded in five priorities: early childhood education, expanded learning, math and literacy education, family and community engagement, and social and mental health services.
Findings
Researchers found that West Kern leaders used funding to develop structures and practices that created high-quality community schools. The following are highlights.
- Allocating resources for instructional improvement: The West Kern Consortium centered math and literacy achievement as key priorities in its community schools initiative. Resources were used to invest in instructional coaches who provided virtual or live guidance, and introduced a data-driven instructional-improvement process that engaged educators in a “coherent suite of professional development activities” throughout the school year focused on continuous improvement.
- Hiring dedicated community school employees: Consortium leaders hired dedicated community school coordinators (CSCs) and social workers. “CSCs played a central role in enabling family and community engagement, while social workers’ primary charge was to better connect students and families to social and mental health resources. As CSCs and social workers maintained distinct primary responsibilities, they collaborated to ensure that critical supports were in place for students and families, particularly in the face of acute challenges,” according to the report. These positions coordinated efforts to reduce chronic absenteeism with great success.
- Creating capacity-building opportunities for community school employees: Special professional development opportunities were made available for CSCs and social workers including communities of practice and individual coaching and engaged in site visits to connect with other community school personnel. “Taken collectively, these capacity-building opportunities coalesced to create a coherent professional development system, which is a critical systems-level support for high-quality community school implementation,” states the report.
- Creating a supportive infrastructure to sustain implementation: West Kern Consortium leaders allocated time and resources to create a supportive, systems-level infrastructure including identifying initiative comanagers, one from each district along with an external consultant, to help with administrative capacity. The initiative also supports the Children’s Cabinet, a cross-sector board that advised comanagers and consortium districts in addressing key challenges and in supporting strategic thinking.
Recommendations
The research team used the West Kern Consortium case study to make some general recommendations for implementing successful community school initiatives. Recommendations include:
- Working together: When small, rural districts come together, they can amass and leverage resources that individual districts would likely not have attained if working independently.
- Create systems for efficient and collaborative management: An intentionally built system for initiative management allows for better sharing of resources and collaboration.
- Adaptability: Processes that allow for adaptability in community school implementation acknowledge and address the diverse dynamics and needs in rural communities. “Approaches used in West Kern embodied this orientation, as consortium leaders provided districts flexibility in using shared resources and, when needed, reallocated resources to support new or alternate interventions,” the report states.
- Facilitating connections: Facilitating opportunities for communication and connection among county and nonprofit officials, rural district leaders and school personnel supports high-quality community school implementation.
- Responding to the conditions in rural settings: Mitigating the day-to-day challenges associated with living and working in rural communities is an important consideration in rural community school implementation. For the West Kern Consortium, this included providing virtual opportunities for professional development and for connecting with one another. “Students and families, too, had travel and resource access burdens eased as full-time community school coordinators and social workers connected them with and, at times, directly delivered services,” according to the report.
