Dive Brief:

• New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced the city would add 69 new schools to the Community Schools Initiative, which would bring the city's total number of community schools offering services for students on school grounds to 215, according to The New York Times.
• The program has decreased absenteeism in the schools but has not yet led to major shifts in student performance, and part of the initiative is the Renewal Schools Program, targeting 94 of the city’s most problematic schools. That program has been more mixed, with the city closing or merging 17 of those schools thus far.
• De Blasio has said that his administration would soon release a plan on how best to target segregation in the city’s schools, but he also acknowledged that if there was a preponderance of segregated housing in the city, it could be difficult to substantially change the school system.

Dive Insight:

While the renewal school program in New York City has had its share of detractors, the notion of community schools has supporters throughout the country. They describe the purpose of a community school as harkening back to the original notion of a schoolhouse as the center of a community or neighborhood, where parents and students alike could access needed services. The Coalition of Community Schools uses a metaphor, with conventional thinking viewing schools as a binary, analog process of information offered from educator to student, while community schools are akin to smartphones, acting as sources of information but also for connection to additional services for those who may be in need.

There are examples of community schools throughout the country, including in Cincinnati, whose program was viewed by mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio as a possible template for the approach New York could take. The community schools approach also addresses a debate about how school is sometimes viewed. Education is often touted as an antidote for poverty, while others believe that the issues in public education cannot be addressed without first addressing the strains poverty puts on the students it affects. Community schools live by the latter notion: Offering students time in the classroom will not suffice, so by becoming community schools, these places of learning can try to ensure that the needs an education cannot meet alone are met as best as possible.