The Primary School: A Community School Model

by Carson Cook, Manager of Policy & Growth at The Primary School

Here at The Primary School, we often get asked: “are you a community school?” The short answer is yes — or, at the very least, we consider ourselves to be implementing a model that aligns with a community schools framework. The question has arisen more frequently lately as California invests in community schools as a model for the future. We put together this brief primer in order to provide some additional background on community schools in California and to highlight how we believe The Primary School can serve as an exemplar for other schools interested in adopting a similar approach in the coming years. 

California’s Bet on Community Schools

Governor Newsom’s administration has made a renewed push over the last few years to elevate the community school model as a vital strategy in the evolution of the state’s public TK-12 education system, putting California’s money (1) where its mouth is in a pitch to “expand and strengthen the implementation and use of the community school model to all schools in communities with high levels of poverty.” (2)

So what is a community school? In California (where the most prominent current national framework (3) has been adopted), the term encompasses pre-kindergarten, elementary, middle, and high schools “using a ‘whole-child’ approach,” that revolves around four core pillars: integrated student supports, family and community engagement, collaborative leadership and practices for educators and administrators, and extended learning time and opportunities. (4) The notion of integration is of particular importance, in more ways than one: not only are community schools expected to internally integrate a variety of supports into their educational strategy, they should work to externally integrate themselves into the surrounding community in a cohesive, sensitive, and collaborative manner.

The Primary School: Community School Principles in Action

The Primary School model, currently implemented in both our East Palo Alto and East Bay sites, is built from the belief that health care and education systems must work together to provide the support that children need to stay healthy and thrive. The Primary School model utilizes a three-pronged overarching strategy: start early, integrate services, and partner with parents. For schools looking to implement a community schools model, we have found that the components that make up our three-pronged strategy align especially well with two of the community schools pillars mentioned above: (1) integrated student supports and (2) family and community engagement. Though our model also implements the other pillars (largely by learning from and leveraging the best practices of many others), we believe our work in these two areas in particular can serve as a key part of a customizable blueprint for schools developing their own community-specific designs.

 
 

Integrated Student Supports: Social and Emotional Learning and Health Programming

Our Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) goals underlie our approach to integration and are baked into every facet of our program. We believe that SEL development is critical to ensuring that the children who pass through The Primary School go on to live productive, happy, and healthy lives, and that belief has led us to craft our own SEL approach. For our youngest students (ages 3-5), we are collaborating with Sesame Workshop to fill the gap in effective whole-child development strategies with a new integrated literacy and SEL curriculum for the preschool years. For all of our students across early childhood and elementary, we are developing and implementing what we call the Mind, Body, Soul (MBS) approach. MBS incorporates a variety of evidence-based practices to ensure that our universal approach to supporting students’ SEL development is both trauma-informed and culturally responsive.

Similar to our SEL approach, we treat student health at The Primary School not as a discrete, siloed element, but as a broadly integrated part of the education model. Health focal points such as nutrition, movement, oral health, and asthma control are promoted throughout the model: classroom instruction, school policies, and family support systems all play a role in maintaining healthy behaviors that cohesively span both school and home environments. We implement regular immunization protocols and physical and developmental screenings, which often take place on site. We understand that for many families, children are spending more of their waking hours at school than anywhere else, which means that making school a hub for preventative medicine in particular — vision and hearing screenings, asthma control, physical fitness — eases the burden on families. 

 
 

Family and Community Engagement: Health Partnerships and Parent Programming

We also recognize that children and families need a true medical home with access to a full slate of preventative and curative care, and that for many families the complexity and siloing of the healthcare system make it difficult to access timely and quality care. By working with local healthcare institutions like Kaiser Permanente and Ravenswood Family Health Center, we ensure that families have a clearly defined point of contact for their health needs. We then implement new forms of communication and coordination between our school and those institutions in order to improve overall well-being. School staff and parents are involved in the process of identification, diagnosis, and treatment, and medical providers are available for education, preventative care, and referrals. Through our partnerships, we not only increase immediate efficacy of care for our students, but provide a collaborative learning and practice opportunity for community organizations to expand their capacity for improving long-term health outcomes. 

For all the components described so far, we stress the importance of involving parents as valued partners in the care and education of their children. But we also believe that the best outcomes for children occur when parents have the ability to learn, grow, and meet their own needs as individuals. With this understanding in mind, we have developed and implemented our Parent Program, which uses a protective factors framework to help parents to strengthen their support networks and connection to resources and prioritize their well-being and confidence. We offer a variety of wellness coaching experiences in order to best support building resilience and community. Individual coaching sessions focus on self efficacy, self care, and self actualization, while group coaching facilitates parents coming together with their peers to collectively build capacity and connection. For us, supporting parents means empowering them to make the changes they want to see in themselves, their families, and their communities.

 
 

As The Primary School continues to grow and evolve, so do our practices.  In both East Palo Alto and the East Bay, we strive to deepen our community connections and expand the depth and breadth of our local partnerships, inviting those collaborators to design alongside our staff and families.  That California has shown the desire to reimagine the future of public elementary education, focusing on whole-child and community-based principles, excites us. We hope that the work described here will be a valuable addition to the learning on community schools across the state, and we look forward to sharing and collaborating in the years to come.

Footnotes

  1. An initial $45 million in the 2020-21 budget and an additional $3 billion (spread out over multiple years) in the 2021-22 budget.

  2. Enacted 2021-22 State Budget, K-12 Education Summary (California Governor's Office, June 2021).

  3. See the Community Schools Playbook (Partnership for the Future of Learning).

  4. Proposed California Community Schools Framework (California State Board of Education, Jan. 2022).
The Primary SchoolNews