A pioneer effort when passed as a bipartisan bill into legislation in 1991, California's Healthy Start initiative now stands out as a promising model for the emerging community school movement. Healthy Start is intended to bring "comprehensive, integrated, supports and services" to California's most disadvantaged K-12 students and schools. Building on the theory that student development and learning are deeply disrupted by barriers such as hunger, illness, unemployment, illiteracy, violence, trauma, and the cycle of poverty, the Healthy Start authors sought to seed a system that offered the opportunity and funding to initiate partnerships to help reduce barriers to learning and promote positive outcomes for the neediest students. This article describes the core components and the outcomes of California's Healthy Start initiative. (Contains 7 notes.)