"The Way We Do School: The Making of Oakland's Full-Service Community School District" offers an in-depth profile of the nation's most ambitious community school initiative. The book focuses on a nearly ten-year effort to transform all eighty-six district schools in Oakland, California into community schools in order to better meet the…

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…

Since 2014, Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) has partnered with the Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities at Stanford University (Gardner Center) to support OUSD's efforts to assess, enhance, and scale their community schools work. They began by working with the district to develop a System Strategy Map to articulate the district's…

In 2010, Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) launched an initiative to transform all district schools into full service community schools. The community school design provides integrated supports to students and fosters a school climate conducive to academic, social, and emotional learning. Interventions span in-school and out-of-school time,…