A few weeks ago, we outlined a different way to think about and build a plan for sustaining and growing your community school work beyond the life of one grant or another – moving beyond viewing sustainability merely as a function of “dollar for dollar replacement,” but instead, viewing it as a process that not only clarifies what exactly we’re hoping to sustain, but also identifies the best strategies to make that happen. Now that you’re thinking more broadly about sustainability, what tools might you use to guide your planning process?
As part of the California Community Schools Partnership Program (CCSPP), the California Department of Education (CDE) created a statewide system of support to provide capacity building, tools, and professional development to community school grantees. Along with Regional Technical Assistance Centers (R-TAC) and making allocations to County Offices of Education, this CCSPP system of support includes the State Transformation Assistance Center (S-TAC)1.
Among the many useful resources the S-TAC team has created is the Sustainability Plan Template, which provides a useful roadmap for community school teams to use to think about, organize ideas around, and chart resources for sustaining their community school work. Like a lot of tools, templates and resources, the S-TAC Sustainability Plan Template is only as useful as the spirit with which it’s used. Now, how might you maximize your use of it?
Commit to the process. Gather one or two other team members to sit with the plan and complete it in a way that will meet the requirements of your CCSPP grant. But…do you want to check the box, or do you want to create a plan that will guide your work towards sustainability and continued community school development for years to come? We thought so. So commit to the process – map out your plan for the plan, including who you need to have participate in the conversations, how you want to break the template up into smaller chunks, and a timeline for not just building the plan, but using it to guide your work over the coming year. An arc of the year for your sustainability plan, in other words.
Work smarter, not harder. You don’t have to look at this as another team to convene or another meeting to add to people’s calendars. Instead, look at where you can weave sustainability planning into existing community school development work. Discussing and working on the sustainability plan can be a standing item on advisory council or leadership team meeting agendas (and I’d argue it should be). Sustaining and growing your community school work should also be a part of site-level School Plan for Student Achievement (SPSA) design and district-level Local Control and Accountability Plan (LCAP) work. Alignment across LCAPs, SPSAs, and community school implementation and sustainability plans can also help your longer-term growth.
Break it into sections. No one is doing all the work in each section all the time, at the same time. Focus on shorter term and longer term priorities and develop a plan accordingly. And keep asking yourself where you can make an investment in capacity building, where you can strengthen partnerships, and how this might connect to both your priorities and your community school implementation plan.
Revisit, refresh, revise. Don’t just complete the plan, submit it, and stick it on the proverbial shelf until you have to submit a progress update next year. Instead, make sure you continue to track back to your plan and see what’s worked, where you might need to shift your focus or adjust your plans, and what needs a bigger adjustment. Consider making sustainability a standing agenda item for community school development meetings moving forward. And, consider using it as another way to engage interest holders in your work.
1 Four organizations – the Sacramento County Office of Education (ACOE), UCLA Center for Community Schooling, Californians for Justice (CFJ), and National Education Association (NEA)– serve as the State Technical Assistance Center (S-TAC) for the California Community Schools Partnership Program (CCSPP). The S-TAC delivers six elements of support for grantees across the state: (1) technical assistance content, guided by an overarching methodology; (2) an implementation rubric; (3) a community of practice among the regional technical assistance centers; (4) a way to coordinate and maximize the expertise of these centers; (5) support for the state to collect and analyze data; and (6) alignment of our work with the Statewide System of Support. Much like the work of developing a community school, we faced the daunting task of bringing together different partners and programs in a way that lifted up the state’s assets and responded to its needs.
Melissa Mitchell is a community school practitioner with more than fifteen years in the field. Her experiences range from Community School Coordinator to leading the Federation for Community Schools, a Illinois-wide capacity building and policy organization. Melissa has supported community school development in a variety of ways, 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.
When asked about their family engagement efforts, many school teams say that they’re putting in the work. But it’s hard to point to evidence of this connection beyond survey results–let alone know how many people took the survey in the first place.
Your LCAP, SPSA and community school (CS) implementation plans should all be nested together. Here's why.
