CCSPP Planning Grant FAQs

A Community School is a school that is organized around a whole child, whole-community approach to learning. Community schools leverage the resources and voices of the whole community – students, families, educators, and community partners – to build relationship-centered, supportive, and equitable school communities where learning is culturally-rooted, inclusive, rigorous, and relevant.

Yes and it depends. The CCSPP grant program is funded in the FY’21 and FY’22 budgets as time-limited, competitive grant resources. However, a successful community school strategy – especially when you are thinking about a systems-level approach to whole-child education – will consider sustainability from the beginning by thinking about leveraging, repurposing, braiding other revenue streams, including the long term resources of core partners.

The intent of the CCSPP and the budgeting allocations/formulas are to fund planning grantees that: 1) have a strong and meaningful planning process; 2) submit an implementation plan; 3) meet the competitive priorities of the grant program (largely in terms of the %FRPM/unduplicated public count).

If you have a robust planning process and implementation plan, you are well-positioned to do strong community school work. REMEMBER, decades of community school practitioners have developed and evolved their work without this massive investment of time-limited dollars. AND there are many efforts and initiatives that have used other one-time funds – e.g., School Improvement Grants, Race to the Top – to seed their community school infrastructure and practices. The money can be helpful, but it should NOT BE the main accelerator for authentic community schools work. Your people and relationships are the most valuable resource.

The “pillars” that are identified in the CCSPP framework just describe common programmatic features of community schools. Much like “ingredients” for making a cake, the pillars describe components that may be present in a community school, but they do not account for the rich interaction of those elements to create something larger than the sum of its parts.

Community schools have developed a coherent vision that reflects a whole-child commitment. The strategy and priority areas reflect the voices, needs, and assets of that particular community. Community-based organizations and other service providers are not just “vendors” providing discrete services, but included as valuable members of the school community, woven into the very fabric of the school. Just because a school or LEA already offers integrated services or family resources does not mean that it is a community school. And in fact, many LEAs already offering a multitude of programs or services find that these are often fragmented or siloed.

The CCSPP planning grant provides a powerful opportunity to strategically revisit the needs and assets of your school communities, engage in authentic conversations to understand and unpack existing disconnections, and figure out specific steps to develop community schools.

The community school strategy can be used to bring together a host of different programs, initiatives and efforts to maximize their impact on academics and youth development. Community school development is not about adding another thing to LEAs’ and schools’ plates. It IS about bringing together all the things that are already happening in LEAs and schools under one strategic “roof” and ensuring that all of the moving parts are working together in support of achieving the same goals.

Tricked ‘ya. Firstly, community schools are NOT about providing services to fix kids or solve their “out of school problems.” Community schools ARE about ensuring that young people learn in schools and communities that reflect the very best of what the science of learning and development tells us. In order to learn, people need to feel safe, valued, engaged, and supported. This MAY mean developing partnerships with organizations and agencies that do provide integrated services or health supports. This MAY mean strengthening and expanding out of school time programming. BUT, it does not mean that the CCSPP funding or opportunity is just about buying more stuff, and schools just “going back to normal.”

Also, it is critical to not make assumptions about what your community needs, and who can meet those needs. Engage in conversation, ask questions, challenge your assumptions, and reflect on how you show up to your partners and community. Partners are not vendors. Trusting and long-term relationships are not transactions. The planning grant actually pays you to take time to explore opportunities and build the relationships that will ultimately sustain this work for the long-term.

That said, we recognize that the landscape of available student and family resources looks very different from community to community. For example, some small, rural, and remote districts may not have the same traditional “partners” found in more urban or suburban areas; in fact, access to basic health and mental health services might be a pain point in the community. The planning grant process can be incredibly helpful to begin exploring creative and strategic means of identifying and strengthening relevant partnerships. CSLX offers additional tools on needs/asset mapping and partnership development that might be helpful–check out our resource library under these topics.

There are many resources available to support you! Every County Office of Education with two or more CCSPP grantees in their county has been awarded $150,000+ to support those LEA grantees. Additionally, CDE has designated eight Regional Technical Assistance Centers (RTAC), and one State Technical Assistance Center (STAC) to provide guidance to Counties. These resources can provide targeted resources on particular aspects of the CCSPP program.

Also, CSLX is here for you!! We are continuously developing new resources, tools, and opportunities to respond to the needs and strengths we are hearing from our LEA friends – AKA,, you! Currently, we are offering training resources and workshops like this, a growing number of communities of practice and role-alike networks, a robust resource library (including videos, tools, and templates), and limited 1:1 coaching opportunities. Check back on our website for more ways we can support you and learn together!

The CCSPP grant program is the state’s historic investment in community school strategies intended to grow, strengthen, and scale community school strategies across the state. The legislature has invested more than $4B in this grant program, funded through 2030-31. The grant program provides funding, and some structured technical assistance. The funding on its own is NOT a community school strategy.

Planning grants fund a 2-year process to plan and are intended for LEAs that do not already “have” community schools (for example, who have not already received state or federal community schools funding or created their own explicit community schools initiative). Implementation grants fund a 5 year implementation plan to strengthen/expand LEA strategies that already “have” existing community schools. If you are not sure, you likely do NOT have community schools and you should apply for a planning grant. Planning grants provide $200,000 over two years to the applying LEA. Implementation grants provide up to $500,000 per school site per year.

We have not heard from any current Planning grant recipients that they do not have intentions other than applying for the Implementation grant. In the event that an LEA and its community school planning team decide–through the course of the planning process–that they are not ready for, or do not want to pursue, an Implementation grant, we have heard no indication from CDE that they will be penalized or have to pay back the Planning grant funds.

The CCSPP planning grant offers an opportunity for districts, schools, county offices of education and their partners to undertake an intentional and thoughtful community school planning process. The funding the grant provides gives teams time to work together to analyze data about students’ and families’ experiences with schools, develop a set of goals or a vision for how they want their schools to function and “be” and create a plan or a roadmap for getting there.

Among other things, the Planning grant funding can cover bringing on board a Community School Manager to spearhead the planning processes at the school levels, and can also support naming a community school lead at the district level to steer the district and its partners through the process. Using the resources provided by the Planning grant to undertake a thoughtful community school development process sets LEAs and their partners up to take full advantage of the opportunities offered by the Implementation grants and develop sustained community school work.

Districts considering applying for a CCSPP planning grant should have support at the Superintendent and cabinet levels. Ideally, applicants will bring together a small group of stakeholders to work together on the grant – this strengthens the application and can serve to jump start some early community school development processes.

Some possibilities to consider for budget allocations:

• Staff/stakeholder time! Participation in a collaborative planning process takes time and effort. Building a budget that compensates participants for their time sets you up to support meaningful participation. Consider compensation for classified and certificated staff, as well as student and family participants.

• Administrative time. You will need someone in the district to staff and “hold” the planning process. This can entail facilitating advisory group meetings, supporting the needs assessment process, engaging with stakeholders, representing the community schools work at cabinet meetings, and other key tasks. If you staff this function with an existing person, consider adjusting their workload accordingly and funding their CS-allocated time (with CCSPP funds, or a district match). You may also want to consider hiring a CS Coordinator–perhaps not immediately (there are advantages to letting this work start within existing district leadership), but as the planning process unfolds.

• Site visits and other trainings. It is important to build in time and budget to support your team’s shared learning.

• Consultant/coach time. Facilitating sustainable community school development is a complex process. It can be helpful to engage professional support–not to “outsource” aspects of the planning process (i.e. a “needs assessment expert”), but rather, coaches or consultants who can “walk the path” with your team and support your internal capacity-building efforts.