CSLX’s 2023-24 Year in Review

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Like many of you, Team CSLX is wrapping up our year–fiscal year, that is! We’re taking our own advice, and reflecting and celebrating the work of our team over these last twelve months. Here’s our team’s highlights reel from ‘23-24.

We provided coaching support via partnerships with 16 school districts and county offices of education

As a part of our work here at CSLX, we partner with local educational agencies (LEA) and county offices of education (COE) to provide high-touch coaching and support. It’s good work, and like all good work, sometimes it’s hard. Over the past year, we worked with 16 LEA and COE clients to:

• Conduct learning sessions for school and community interest holders (more than we can count!).

• Convene communities of practice, allowing practitioners to connect with and learn from each other, work through the challenges that inevitably arise through the course of doing CS development (everything from leadership and staff changes to skepticism and reluctance to the thorny problems inherent in change efforts).

• Build teams’ capacities to engage in shared leadership and decision making,

• Co-create a comprehensive strategy for their CS development work – one that included a whole-child centered approach and breaking down silos that sometimes exist between departments, initiatives and people.

• Build out and implement arches of the year for their CS development work

• Wrestle with the CCSPP Implementation Grant RFA (more on that later) and use the application as a way to strengthen their CS development.

Our team of coaches saw clients:

• Change the nature of their relationship with and capacities for gathering and analyzing data.

• Expand their youth voice and youth leadership work.

• Lean in to the Wheel, for example co-designing and co-leading professional learning opportunities (Supportive Infrastructure), demonstrating their ownership of the work and their commitment to whole-system transformation.

• Grow their capacities to engage in inclusive decision making, build trusting relationships, and engage in thoughtful – sometimes challenging – conversations with their own teams, colleagues and interest holders.

We also worked with clients to develop resources, tools and materials to support their community school (CS) development, ranging from presentation decks and arches of the year for practitioner capacity building to deep dives into topics like culturally-sustaining community schools and cross-county integrated services systems’ inventories.

We continued to lift up our community’s learnings via our Learning Exchange work

The “LX” in CSLX stands for Learning Exchange, and we take that aspect of our organizational mission to heart. From building a dedicated Research team on staff (look for upcoming work on the Enabling Conditions and connecting research to practice!) to creating opportunities for practitioners to learn from each other, in these last twelve months, CSLX was proud to continue to lift up our community’s learnings. Some of our highlights:

• CSLX co-produced a study tour with the Oakland Unified School District Community Schools Department and Fremont High School for CS practitioners from around the state to see whole-child centered CS development “in real life” at Fremont High. Participants heard from Principal Nidya Baez and Community School Manager (CSM) Carmen Jimenez, students, teachers, and families, and saw the impact that investing work into building trusting relationships among and across interest groups has on CS development–and more importantly, on students.

• We hosted a convening of public sector, nonprofit and philanthropic leaders to take stock of what would need to be true in order to realize and sustain a collective movement in support of young people. Not just money, not just leadership, and not just shared frameworks around collective impact–but realistic action towards collective stewardship. (different term – digging into big ideas and structural and systems change necessary to fulfill the promise not just of CS but of a whole-child centered, high quality education for all).

• CSLX’s Managing Director Hayin Kimner, Director of Resource Development Melissa Mitchell, and Director of Client Services Ali Metzler each participated in a year-long learning experience with the Improvement Collective about applying improvement science to education. We used this opportunity to further articulate our coaching approach, develop new skills to apply to our work as an improvement-focused organization, and learn new ways to help our partners apply improvement science in their own community school development work.

We engaged in field building to help practitioners accelerate their CS development work

In addition to 1:1 coaching, the Community Schools Learning Exchange (CSLX) prioritizes broader field building, as well – sharing what we’ve learned far and wide, and creating learning opportunities that allow practitioners to share their strengths and strategies, too.

• In this last fiscal year, CSLX hosted eight targeted capacity-building sessions, open to practitioners far and wide. Some were two-hour virtual workshops, others were two-day in-person sessions, and some were a mix of in-person and virtual. Topics ranged from Community School Essentials to moving from a data culture of compliance to one of curiosity. We tackled building transformational interest holder engagement and dove deep into Essentials for Community School Transformation Framework (or as we like to call it, “the Wheel”). No matter what the format or topic, all of our capacity-building sessions feature some common elements – sharing our expertise, holding space for practitioners to connect, engaging with each other and practicing new skills, and action planning. We’re working on taking what we learned from you all and developing capacity building offerings and learning opportunities for the 2024-2025 school year.

• Conferences, conferences, conferences! CSLX gave presentations, participated in panels, and led talks at 16 different conferences and convenings across the country. From the S-TAC Summit in Hollywood, to the White House Youth Policy Summit and the Brookings’ Global Symposium in Washington, D.C. to the CSxFE Conference in Atlanta, the CSBA Conference in San Francisco and the CA Association of Bilingual Ed in Anaheim (you get the picture), we’ve earned some serious frequent flier miles these last twelve months–and heard (and shared!) some big ideas from and with peers and colleagues across the country.

• From November-January, CSLX partnered with Collective Agency to offer the CCSPP Grant Cohort Series, a virtual learning series that offered targeted support to 37 LEAs as they worked on their California Community Schools Partnership Program (CCSPP) Implementation Grant requests for proposal (RFA). Over the course of four sessions, we walked participants through the grant requirements, advised different ways they could organize their information and artifacts to best showcase their work, facilitated opportunities for them to engage in community schools visioning and interest holder engagement in ways that served their CS development work regardless of the outcome of their CCSPP grant applications. In the end, 28 of the LEAs who participated were awarded grants, totalling $71,132,000 for 61 sites to build out their CS work.

• We developed content and resources for the larger field, including building out our Basics series (The Role of the Community School Coordinator Basics has been a big hit), guidance on connecting your LCAP, SPSA and CS implementation plans, and more.

It’s been quite the year. So, what does all of this mean for our work moving forward? We learned that you all are eager for tools and strategies that help you strengthen your CS work, so we’re working on new capacity building opportunities going deeper into topics like data, building trusting relationships and CS Essentials. We’re building out web-based resources to support CSCs, principals and district-level CS Leads. We’re thinking about how we work with CS superstars across the country to create or create access to tools that practitioners can really use in your LEAs and sites – practical and impactful tools that are useful where the rubber meets the road. And we’re always looking for opportunities to connect you all to each other!

And we’re thinking about what we still want to know…like what do the Enabling Conditions look like IRL, and how do people know where they are in developing those capacities? We’re thinking about how to support LEAs as they work to strengthen their CS development amidst ESSER’s fiscal cliffs and beyond CCSPP grants. We’re engaging people in asking and trying to answer big questions around what it means to engage in collective stewardship and what truly whole-child centered schools and systems look like. It’s going to be a great (fiscal) year!

Have feedback, questions, or ideas for different ways CSLX might be able to support your work? Get in touch.

Want to learn more about the rock stars who led all of this great work? Meet our team.

by Melissa Mitchell

Melissa Mitchell is Senior Associate at the Community Schools Learning Exchange (CSLX). She brings over 15 years of experience supporting community school development, from providing coaching and direct technical assistance to schools, districts, practitioners and community partners, to working with legislators and policymakers to develop supportive-state level policies that advanced community school development across Illinois. Get in touch with Melissa via email at melissa@cslx.org.