The California Community Schools Learning Exchange (CSLX) works in partnership with practitioners, researchers, and policy-influencers to strengthen high quality implementation of whole child approaches to teaching and learning. California has placed a big bet on community schools, with its $2.8 billion investment in the CA Community Schools Partnership Program grant program (CCSPP) – especially important as we confront the education equity challenges that have been further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

This massive influx of state funding to seed, strengthen, and scale community school approaches across the state demands that we work together to more accurately describe the nuances of community schools implementation, what needs to be in place in order to ensure efficacy, and how to best evaluate and strengthen community school efforts.

The community schools work in California can be further strengthened by intentional alignment with US ED’s Full Service Community School (FSCS) grant program. As such, we are pleased to offer the following public comment on the Proposed Priorities, Requirement, Definitions, and Selection Criteria-Full-Service Community Schools Program, based on the decades of community schools expertise and experiences of educators and partners across our state.