[“We knew the community schools idea would better address what
our students need.” Even though implementations are still in their
early phases, the schools and the families who attend them are already
seeing tangible benefits.]
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LA TEACHERS MAKE GOOD THEIR PROMISE TO SUPPORT COMMUNITY SCHOOLS  
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Jeff Bryant
March 24, 2023
Independent Media Institute [[link removed]]

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_ “We knew the community schools idea would better address what our
students need.” Even though implementations are still in their early
phases, the schools and the families who attend them are already
seeing tangible benefits. _

Taken today in LA for the teachers strike rally, by john_pittman (CC
BY-NC-SA 2.0)

 

"We should have been miserable,” said Emily Grijalva, recalling the
first days of the 2019 strike by Los Angeles teachers. Grijalva, who
is currently the community school and restorative justice coordinator
at Felicitas and Gonzalo Mendez High School
[[link removed]], joined her colleagues on the picket line
in 2019 despite the biting cold and an unusual, prolonged rainstorm
that flooded city streets and sidewalks and drenched picketers. Many
of them did not wear, much less own, suitable rain gear for their
normally sunny, mild Southern California climate.

“But even through the rain and cold, we felt togetherness and
support from the community. Families dropped off food for the
teachers, students and parents joined us on the front lines, and
people opened their homes to let us dry off or use the bathroom,”
she said.

Grijalva’s experience in 2019 might get a replay in 2023 as, once
again, teachers in Los Angeles joined in a three-day strike
[[link removed]] in
support of the 30,000 school service workers
[[link removed]] who are
leading the labor action. One factor that may figure prominently in
the teachers’ corner is their success in 2019 at convincing the
district
[[link removed]] to
provide funding for converting 30 campuses to what’s become known
as community schools
[[link removed]].

The community schools approach seeks to strengthen the relationships
between public schools and their surrounding communities by addressing
the broader needs and interests of children and families and giving
students, parents, and community members more of a voice in guiding
school policies and programs.

In its account of the 2019 strike
[[link removed]], Reclaim
Our Schools LA [[link removed]] (ROSLA)—a
coalition of community groups and the teachers’ union, the United
Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA)—noted that one of the demands the
teachers won in their contract negotiations was nearly $12 million in
funding from the district for the development of community schools.

The demand grew out of an agreement among the groups that formed ROSLA
in 2016 to make community schools a key part of the coalition’s
organizing strategy. The strategy would include educating the general
public on the concept of community schools and forcing district
leadership “to take sides: were they for—or against—this
research-supported school design?” as ROSLA’s case study
[[link removed]] of
the 2019 strike explained. The strategy appears to have worked.

The 2019 contract hammered out between UTLA and the Los Angeles
Unified School District (LAUSD) called for funding of community
schools implementations in 30 campuses, Capital and Main reported
[[link removed]] in
2021, with allocations of $150,000 in the first year of transition and
$250,000 in the second year. It also established the Community
Schools Steering Committee
[[link removed]],
which oversees the transition process. In 2021, the district added
funding
[[link removed]] for
transitioning 40 more community schools over the next three years.

“We knew the community schools idea would better address what our
students need,” Grijalva said. Even though implementations of the
approach are still very much in their early phases, the schools, and
the families who attend them, are already seeing tangible benefits.

‘The Way Every School Should Be Run’

“I knew nothing about community schools when we went on strike [in
2019],” said David George, the community school coordinator
at Marina del Rey Middle School and Performing Arts Magnet
[[link removed]]. But the approach’s appearance on
the union’s platform prompted him to read more about it. “I’m
now a big believer that this is the way every school should be run,”
he said.

Much of George’s conversion to the community schools approach is due
to what it’s done for his school, where he taught history for 16
years until transitioning into his current role in January 2020.

The school—a combination of a performing arts magnet drawing
students from outside its South Los Angeles community and a marine
science academy drawing students mostly from the surrounding
community—has long struggled. Enrollment has declined over the past
two decades, George said, from 1,400 when he started with the school
in 2004 to the current 450 students. He noted, though, that there has
been a recent uptick in enrollment in the past two years.

The school’s student population is 45 percent Hispanic and 50
percent Black, two demographics the district is least successful
[[link removed]] at
educating. According to George, virtually all the students qualify for
the federal government’s free and reduced-price meal program, a
common identifier for poverty. “The school has had low test scores
for as long as I’ve worked here,” he said.

George’s first few months as a community school coordinator were a
bit of a baptism by fire. A mere 60 days after he started, the
pandemic closed his school and sent students and teachers into a
hastily contrived online learning mode. But he quickly learned how the
philosophy of the approach helped the school address some of the
pandemic’s most difficult challenges.

First, because one of the supporting pillars
[[link removed]] of the community
schools strategy is “active family and community engagement,”
George and his colleagues were already attuned to the need to reach
out to families, and they had developed the beginnings of a system for
doing that.

“We quickly found out which families had become disconnected from
the school, which had become unhoused, and which needed to be told
about the weekly food bank that the school had set up with the help of
a local partner,” he said. “When we found out we had two students
whose parents had been shot and killed, we had the capacity to find
out what kind of mental health support they needed and how they could
get it.”

George and his colleagues also rallied around another pillar
[[link removed]] of the
community schools approach: to develop partnerships in the community
for integrating health care, nutrition, and other student supports
with the academic program.

“We had success with a mobile dental clinic that came to the school.
Now it’s going to come twice a year,” he said. “We had a vision
company come and examine our students. Thirty percent had issues
related to glasses. Half of the students who got new glasses had never
worn glasses before. One student was legally blind in one eye, and his
parents didn’t even know it.”

Since a return to in-person schooling, Marina del Rey’s
implementation of the community schools approach has also focused on
expanding learning opportunities for students, another pillar
[[link removed]] of the
community schools approach.

The school has added a girls’ empowerment group that meets twice a
week to learn about entrepreneurship and other life skills. It also
offers a robotics program, and it’s about to start a program for
teaching computer coding. The school has introduced students to local
Hispanic and Black artists and had local artists come in to teach
students how to paint and draw.

Using a grant from the California Department of Food and Agriculture,
the school started a culinary justice program that has students
growing and harvesting their own food. “When I took a photo of one
of the students working in the garden and emailed it to the parent,”
George recalled, “I got the nicest note in reply, saying ‘You
don’t know how happy this made me feel. My kid couldn’t wait to
come to school because of this project.’”

Another new addition is an adult education program, beginning with
students learning English as a second language. Half of the adults
enrolled aren’t even parents of students in the school, but they
live in the local neighborhood and will help with improving the
reputation of the school.

‘Our Lighthouses’

Other community school coordinators in LAUSD report similar benefits
from using this approach.

“I had absolutely zero awareness of the community schools strategy
until my principal asked me to help with the application,” said
Julie Chun who is the community school coordinator at John H. Francis
Polytechnic Senior High School [[link removed]] in the Sun
Valley area. “When I learned what [community schools] entailed,”
she recalled, “I realized it aligned with my vision of what school
should be. The reason I went into education to begin with was to
promote equity, and the community schools strategy does that.”

The school, located in the San Fernando Valley area, is quite large
with an enrollment of 2,200 students, a large majority of whom
identify as Hispanic. Ninety-four percent have been identified as
socioeconomically disadvantaged, according to Chun. Many of the
students are also designated as English language learners, and
virtually all qualify for the federal government’s free and
reduced-price meals program.

_JEFF BRYANT is a writing fellow and chief correspondent for Our
Schools [[link removed]], a
project of the Independent Media Institute. He is a communications
consultant, freelance writer, advocacy journalist, and director of the
Education Opportunity Network, a strategy and messaging center for
progressive education policy. His award-winning commentary and
reporting routinely appear in prominent online news outlets, and he
speaks frequently at national events about public education policy.
Follow him on Twitter @jeffbcdm [[link removed]]._

_This article was produced by Our Schools, a project of the
Independent Media Institute._

* Teachers
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* Los Angeles Schools
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* Teachers' Strike
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