For the past five years, the Hayward Unified School District has been focusing on its lowest-income neighborhoods, transitioning to a “community schools” approach that provides health, social and other services to students and their families.
The East Bay Area district south of Oakland offers a case study in the potential of an approach whose goal is to transform schools into hubs for the entire community by offering a range of services, such as mental health counseling, health clinics, after-school programs and classes for parents.
Nationwide, about 5,000 community schools serve 2 million students, according to the Coalition for Community Schools. The concept is “catching on in California,” said Deanna Niebuhr, senior director of the Community Schools Initiative of thePartnership for Children & Youth, a nonprofit organization based in Oakland. In response, the partnership launched a statewide network in September to connect community school districts to each other and to advocates who work with them.
[For more of this story, written by Susan Frey, go to http://edsource.org/2015/distr...munity-schools/91151]
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