On Friday 3/25, our Managing Director, Hayin Kimner, had the opportunity to provide comments at the White House to share about lessons learned and the role for the federal government and administration in sustaining and expanding community school implementation. Hayin highlighted three areas in which federal policy might play an important role strengthening the field:

1. Alignment: This is about increasing cohesion around core community school concepts; this alignment too must be modeled by and reflected in federal investments. The “systemness” that is central to coherence and alignment of multiple whole-child, whole-family and whole-community strategies is often overlooked in favor of fragmented funding streams and programmatic silos that unintentionally undermine an effective and mutually reinforcing child-serving system. Consider how, for example, separate federal investments in Choice Neighborhoods, Promise Neighborhoods, Community Schools, The Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act could better reflect alignment with a coherent and shared set of standards for implementation, outcomes measures, and explicit connections to other federal and state investments. This work starts from the top. Such through lines are invaluable to creating the collective impact needed to realize population level shifts in student and community well being and academic success.

2. Scaling: Funding is an obvious component of scaling sustainable community schools. Many of us are pleased by the recent announcement from Secretaries Cardona and Becerra to provide support to make it easier for schools to access Medicaid funding to provide on-campus health services. It is important to note however, that this work cannot just be about supporting schools to better tap into funding streams. Fundamentally, it should not be the sole responsibility of LEAs and schools to shoulder the responsibility (and staffing) of accessing, braiding and blending funding to pay for the costs of meeting the needs of students. A couple examples:

• Schools are currently obligated to serve all students under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. This makes sense; schools are the one publicly funded institution that proactively see young people nearly every day, and as such can deploy prevention and early intervention strategies. Yet schools are also left with the primary responsibility to at least initially pay for the services and interventions that students not only need, but are entitled to (especially those that are enrolled in Medicaid). Education systems often expend their instructional dollars on health services, before undertaking the administrative burden of being partially reimbursed. And when states and their SEAs are left to separately determine reimbursement rates for federal Medicaid (as an example, CA is currently reimbursed around $29 in Medicaid funds per Medicaid-enrolled school-age child versus roughly $500 per child in RI and New Hampshire), the overall inequities of school funding to support community school strategies are further exacerbated, especially in states where school funding adequacy is a major structural challenge.
• Second, all of this is especially troublesome in light of the current mental health crisis. Currently, children’s Medicaid has an established schedule of prevention and early intervention services to keep children physically well; there is no such clarity for their mental well-being. Reimbursement formulas and rules are based on what is deemed “medically necessary” – even when it comes to mental health. This criteria must be revisited. We cannot wait for young people to end up in crisis to determine that a mental health service is “medically necessary.”

3. Building: Building successful community schools demands reliable data, rigorous evaluation, and a focus on improvement. Implementation of community schools is developmental and iterative; the goal is systems transformation which cannot be measured solely by tracking transactional program metrics and piecemeal individual outcomes. While evaluation of community schools must happen – it is the only way we can improve and advance as a field – we must build evaluations that appropriately and reliably measure the impact of the full strategy. Evaluation needs to be in service of strengthening practice – not picking winners and losers. Funded evaluations (and their methodologies) from US ED’s Office of Innovation and Research provide useful and relevant examples of rigorous mixed-methods studies that account for complex, developmental implementation of education innovation.

Again, we are so appreciative of the Biden administration's support and recognition that equitable community school success requires a multi-sector, multi-level commitment to change. Another big shout-out to many colleagues and partners who were also part of this important policy-informing conversation!