A university-assisted, place-based model for enhancing students’ peer, family, and community ecologies

Community schools have recently (re)emerged in the United States as a vital, comprehensive strategy for addressing poverty-related barriers to children’s school learning. However, not all low-income school communities are endowed with the resources needed to launch a comprehensive array of school-based/linked services and programs. In this article, the authors describe a place-based model for school improvement for low-income school communities where formal and fiscal resources are in short-supply. Framed by two best-practice interventions from the youth development and family support literatures, the authors identify five “high leverage” improvement mechanisms that social workers, educators, and parents can collaboratively target to affect change. These improvement mechanisms, together with the interventions they implicate, can help community school efforts provide a more powerful, engagement-focused reach into students’ peer, family, and community ecologies.