Are Community Schools the Positive Disruptor Public Education Needs?

“It’s important for people to know they can trust schools,” Jenna Fernholz told The Progressive during a call over Zoom in early March. “That’s a hard thing in this time and in this administration. But there are people on the ground who are really working hard for our families and our kids.”

When Fernholz, a school principal in La Crosse, Wisconsin, talks about “people on the ground,” she undoubtedly includes herself and her colleagues at Hamilton Elementary School. The administration she referred to is, of course, the presidential administration of Donald Trump, which has accused K-12 public schools of “radical indoctrination” and has proposed redirecting government money for public schools to privately operated alternatives.

Although surveys have found that a vast majority of parents throughout the country trust public school teachers, evidence suggests that the public’s trust in the nation’s public education system is being eroded by years of culture-war attacks on schools and an oft-repeated narrative that public schools are failed institutions filled with educators who are lying to parents to cover up that failure.

But for Fernholz, trust isn’t just a sentiment—it’s essential for the success of the difficult work of school improvement. Her school is implementing an approach to improvement commonly referred to as community schools.

The community schools approach looks different depending on location, but the basic idea is that schools should serve as local hubs not only for education services, but also meet the broader needs of students and families such as physical and mental health, housing, transportation, after-school care, and neighborhood improvement. To provide these services, schools partner with local organizations, including nonprofits and businesses. And students, parents, community members, and school staff help to determine school policies and activities, such as curriculum offerings and sports programs.

Fernholz knew Hamilton was a community school when she became principal in 2022, but she wasn’t certain about what that designation entailed. “I kind of felt like all schools were community schools, because they’re in a neighborhood,” she recalled. “But I didn’t fully realize how the model works and how impactful the approach is.”

“In my previous school, we did things like food drives and handed out free clothing, like we do at Hamilton. But the community schools approach requires us to dive in deeper, to look for what is at the root of the academic and social-emotional problems our kids are having, and what we need to do to help address those problems,” Fernholz said. 

Fernholz knew, for instance, that Hamilton serves generally low-income families—nearly 85 percent are considered economically disadvantaged—and has an unusually high percentage of students, nearly one in three, with disabilities. But she was surprised to learn how many of her students and their family members struggle with mental health, and how challenging it can be for some Hamilton students just to get to school.

“We want students to learn to read and do math,” Fernholz said. “But there is a whole other side we have to tackle first in order for them to be ready to learn.”

Fernholz and her colleagues wouldn’t have learned any of this about their school’s community if Hamilton students and families didn’t trust them enough to speak up.

“We’re working with families who, generationally, going back to the grandparents, may not have had good relationships with schools or other government agencies,” says Jon Zinniel, the community schools coordinator at Hamilton. “They’re coming in with an inherited distrust of institutions, so in our first year [of implementing the community schools approach], our focus was on building positive relationships.”

To build these relationships, the school began offering family nights that included an evening meal and program such as a talk or children’s concert. The school also conducted a series of outreach efforts—what community school practitioners call a needs and assets assessment—to ask students and families what they need and want to see from their schools.

Those outreaches weren’t always successful, according to Zinniel. “There are some families we still struggle with,” he says. “They might not take our calls. So we’re also knocking on doors.”

Drawing from the responses to the needs and assets assessments, the school has undertaken an array of initiatives, including providing more sports activities, student clubs, and field trips. “ For the families that show up, their gratitude is off the charts,” Zinniel says. “That’s helped build positive relationships.”

As the school put into place programs and activities that students and parents asked for, community engagement has increased. In 2024, Hamilton increased attendance at its monthly family nights by an average of 56 family members from the year before, while the rate of student involvement  in at least one after-school activity or program jumped to 89 percent.

Fernholz says that improving relationships with families and students has also had a transformative impact on Hamilton’s climate and culture. “When I got here, I was always chasing students and keeping them in classrooms and dealing with aggressive behaviors,” she said. “Our hallways are quieter now. Our classrooms are much more organized. When you walk through the hallways you see a lot more learning going on.”

It’s not altogether clear whether the community schools approach is having a positive impact on Hamilton’s academic performance as measure by standardized testing (the state has changed the scoring criteria for its annual performance reporting system), but it has made a “big difference” on school-community relationships, according to Alicia Place, the community services coordinator for the School District of La Crosse.

Place says more parents are coming to school meetings and getting involved with activities in the two La Crosse schools that have adopted the community schools approach, Hamilton and Northside Elementary. “Certainly, all schools are trying to be collaborative, but it just helps a lot when you have [a community schools coordinator] on staff dedicated to this,” she says.

Place also sees a clear benefit to using the needs and assets assessment process as part of the community schools strategy: Seventy-five to 100 percent of families at Hamilton and Northside are responding to the surveys. “It’s the difference between knowing what communities want and just guessing,” Place says.

Place cautions that data reported from Hamilton and Northside, where parent engagement and school climate have also improved, are in no way conclusive proof of the community schools approach’s success. 

“Improving schools through the community schools approach is legacy work,” Place says. “Transformation takes time.” 

But there are signs that parents are noticing a difference: While La Crosse, like many school districts, is experiencing an overall enrollment decline, Hamitlon and Northside are seeing increasing numbers of families requesting enrollment. 

None of this is to say that schools can easily earn back parents’ trust through better engagement and outreach alone, especially given the political and ideological nature of some issues that can divide communities. One such schism, Fernholz and Zinniel say, is in their own building.

Hamilton shares its campus with the School of Technology and Arts I (SOTA), a charter school operated by the district. SOTA opened in 1997, four years after Wisconsin began its statewide rollout of district-operated “instrumentality” charters. That year, the state opened the charter school sector to include independent operators, and since then, the rush to privatize Wisconsin public schools has continued apace, including the adoption of a statewide school voucher program.

For decades, education reformers nationwide have promoted charter schools, voucher programs, and other forms of so-called school choice as necessary “disruptors” to supposedly failed public school systems. But the impact of that disruption is unevenly experienced across communities.

Although Hamilton and SOTA are housed together, the differences between the students in each school are stark. SOTA serves far fewer students who are economically disadvantaged—a little more than 50 percent compared to Hamilton’s 85 percent—and has about half the percentage of students with disabilities that Hamilton has. While 35 percent of Hamilton students are white, SOTA’s student body is 67 percent white.

As principal of both schools, Fernholz is aware of what she calls the “different philosophies” of the schools. For instance, while the community schools approach relies on a shared governance model that invites students, parents, and community members into the decision-making process, charter schools are usually governed by private, un-elected boards. While community schools create partnerships with local businesses and nonprofits, charter schools often outsource school programs and services to private management firms—frequently, for-profit firms—that usually aren’t located in the same city or even the same state. And charter schools are often accused of not enrolling the same students that public schools do. 

“It makes it tricky,” she says. “It really brings the divide of, I don’t want to say the haves and have nots, but we have this population of kids [at SOTA] that might have a different experience than we have [at Hamilton].”

Yet, Fernholz sees how the community schools approach can bridge that divide by building a sense of community that transcends differences in race, income, and ability.

“Technically, [SOTA is] one of our partners. We want them to participate in [Hamilton programs and activities] because we are one building, and we want to bring our community together,” she said.

“Hamilton is officially the community school, but SOTA is part of our community,” says Zinniel. “Whatever we’re offering to families at Hamilton, we’re offering it to SOTA families too,” he says, referencing the family nights, school events, sports and after-school programs, and the school’s food bank and clothes closet.

Zinniel says SOTA students were included in the needs and assets assessments, and that their responses were markedly similar to those of the public school students.

“Every school has challenges, even schools like SOTA,” Zinniel says. “But the biggest challenge both campuses face is how we can create more collaboration, so people become more comfortable with each other, understand each other more, and leverage different assets from each group for the benefit of the students and the school as a whole.”

The idea that Hamilton educators, using the community schools approach, could succeed in breaking down barriers that have been deliberately constructed strikes Zinniel as an ironic outcome: “Maybe this is how community schools can be a positive disruptor.”