Scaling The Community School Strategy In New York City

Transcript

The Children’s Aid Society and the Center for New York City Affairs announce the release of a new report detailing what it will take to sustain the city’s new community schools initiative. New York City has long been home to some of the nation’s most celebrated community schools—where school leaders, community partners, and parents come together to build a network of comprehensive support services around students and their families—but until recently there has been little support for this strategy at the city level. This changed in June when the de Blasio administration introduced an initiative to establish 100 more community schools and announced a grant to launch the first 45 this school year. While this initiative can draw on lessons learned by the many community school systems developing nationwide, New York City will have the challenge and opportunity of adapting them to a school district with over 1.1 million children. In this report, we draw on interviews with over 60 experts here in New York City and around the country. We provide helpful tools for individual community school providers as well as recommendations around effective partnerships, financing, leadership, and capacity building to help the city as it works to achieve its vision of reform. This report was made possible thanks to the generous support of the Sirus Fund. The Center for New York City Affairs is an applied policy research institute based at the Milano School of International Affairs, Management and Urban Policy.