The community school model posits that the traditional school model is not sufficient to overcome the role of poverty in equitable access to learning, and that improving student achievement requires addressing the needs of the whole child. By leveraging community partnerships to address student barriers to learning and shift relationships between schools, families, and community, the community school model represents an expanded vision of what schools are, who they include, and what they are responsible for. This paper aims to improve our understanding of community school implementation, based on qualitative research in five community schools in Oakland, California. We apply the Children's Aid Society's framework of four community school capacities including: (1) comprehensiveness; (2) collaboration; (3) coherence; and (4) commitment (Lubell, 2011) in our analysis. We find evidence of a collaborative culture, in which school and community partner staff worked together across traditional boundaries to serve students. Schools showed signs of coherence of vision and goals, and alignment of services and supports with the instructional core of the school. Community school strategies not only provided important school-based services but also represented an expansion of the traditional school model by leveraging and aligning community partners to improve student outcomes.

With historic investments in the community school approach at the federal and state levels, educational leaders must understand how to build, implement, and sustain high-quality community schools in policy and practice. This study builds this understanding by examining the relationship between district support, community schools, and whole child educational practices within the Oakland Unified School District. This report describes how the district supports three community schools—one elementary, one middle, and one high school—by providing a centralized infrastructure that enables them to function as community schools while also prioritizing whole child educational practices.