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.”

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Our Shared Experience of Being Under Attack

One of Donald Trump’s first acts as President was to sign an Executive Order insisting that there are only two biological sexes: male and female. While it’s not within the power of the President of the United States or any other country to mandate such a thing, Trump’s move had immediate effects. It went hand in hand with an order eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs in federal agencies. Across the United States, corporations and universities dropped their DEI programs, either out of fear of losing federal funds or contracts, or simply to impress the administration with their ability to change with the times.

Trump’s actions most immediately affect transgender and nonbinary people, denying access to gender-affirming care, gender-marker changes on IDs, and a variety of other services that allow trans and nonbinary people to safely and comfortably exist in their bodies and in the world. If this were all the administration did, it would be enough. But orders enforcing so-called biological sex are about much more than banning trans people from public life. Reinforcing a supposedly “traditional” binary is about gender roles broadly: It is about men getting manly-man jobs and women returning to the kitchen and the nursery.

As historian Jules Gill-Peterson writes in her book A Short History of Trans Misogyny, rightwing authoritarianism comes first for trans women “because it aims to preserve, or entrench, existing social hierarchies through the production of an imagined threat from those with the least demonstrated power, demanding violence to put them down.” (Trump’s Executive Orders are clothed in the language of “defend[ing] women’s rights,” marking out trans women in particular as a threat.) Misogyny broadly is not simple hatred of women, nor is trans misogyny or transphobia a somehow natural fear of trans people’s bodies. Rather, Gill-Peterson writes, it is social and often state policing and punishment inflicted upon “certain women for their perceived failures to stay subordinate to men.” Transphobic violence and policy are tools to keep us all in line—and the line they want us toeing is one of a very particular set of gender roles.

This is visible in Trump’s policies, Sharita Gruberg, vice president for economic justice at the National Partnership for Women and Families (NPWF), explains to me. The Executive Order, she says, allows members of the Trump Administration “to review anything that has gender in it.” The public face was the attack on trans people, but the implementation goes beyond, “trying to claw back gender equity projects and work and data.”

NPWF’s research shows that states that have attacked or banned gender-affirming care have also banned or attempted to ban abortion; the laws are written by the same set of politicians broadly aligned with Trump’s agenda. (Commentators have noted that the Executive Order’s fixation on sex “at conception” aligns with attempts at legislating a fetus as a person.) Those same states often lack the kinds of equal pay protections and paid leave that have made it possible for women to enter and succeed in the workplace. These states have low minimum wages and often have not expanded Medicaid.

“The biological essentialism reinforces gender essentialism, which is just not how most families work regardless of their gender and biological sex makeup,” says Kate Bahn, chief economist and senior vice president of research at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. “The reality of modern American family life requires much more flexibility. The reality is that it’s mostly two working parents these days who are piecing it together the best way they can, because we have an economy that requires both parents to work. Reinforcing this binary harms families that are actually trying to figure out ways to care for each other.”

Such retrograde gender roles are central to the ideal that “Make America Great Again” aspires to, yet that ideal was never a reality for most people, Bahn notes. Women—particularly Black women—have always participated in the workforce more than the idealized Leave It to Beaver, mid-century memory shows. And today, that reality is even less likely to apply, despite the best efforts of “tradwife” influencers. Women are in the workforce out of necessity as much as desire, and most children, even if they do grow up in a family with one man and one woman as parents, will see both of them going to work because the rent is too damn high. That means that birthing parents probably need access to lactation rooms or at least a private space; meanwhile, a man might have to bring his young child into the restroom regardless of the gender on the restroom door. Today’s realities, though, are the last things on the minds of Trump Administration policymakers.

The Trump playbook, Gruberg notes, looks very similar to the one that has existed around the globe since at least the 1980s. The Vatican, for example, opposed not only abortion, but also women working outside of the home, the entire existence of queer people, and then trans people as a more recent addition.

“The attacks that we’re seeing in the administration on trans people are aligned with that worldview, [which is] trying to re-establish in multiple ways this belief that they have of not only two genders or two sexes, whatever word they’re using that day, but that those two also have some prescribed role by God that they’re supposed to uphold.”

While it’s easy to see that social conservatives, like former Vice President Mike Pence, think this way, researchers such as Melinda Cooper have noted that neoliberalism, too, is invested in propping up a certain kind of “family values.” In her book of the same name—Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism—Cooper writes, “It would not be an exaggeration to say that the enormous political activism of American neoliberals in the 1970s was inspired by the fact of changing family structures.” Cooper points out that Chicago school economists like Gary Becker “understood the breakdown of the Fordist family wage to be the critical event of his time, and one whose reverberations could be discerned in everything from shifting race relations to the recomposition of the labor market and the changing imperatives of social welfare.” Neoliberals, she argued, were concerned with the “social costs” that come from the breakdown of the Fordist family—the wife at home supported by a husband making enough money to pay all the bills. Those costs are financial: Neoliberals were, of course, obsessed with welfare reform and refusing to pay for children who were not born in the right kind of family.

Becker, Bahn notes, argued that “under modern capitalism, specialization is the most productive way to allocate resources . . . . But he thought households worked that way as well. He thought households should specialize.” He described people as different “types” rather than explicitly referring to gender, she notes, but still, “basically in his ideal world, girls would just go to home economics and boys would take the other suite of classes, because if, generally speaking, girls have more of an affinity for caregiving, why would you train them in anything else?” Such families, organized into hierarchies, were the building blocks of the broader hierarchical society that thinkers like Becker wanted to uphold.

Of course, since the decline of the Fordist factory job, few families can afford such specialization—or rather, the specialization continues, and women continue to do most of the care work, but they do it as a “second shift” after a paid job that contributes to the family and the broader economy. “The rise of inequality would be much worse, but the fact that women have increased their labor force participation and have more access to a greater variety of jobs is the thing that has stabilized families in the past forty years,” Bahn says.

But the MAGA longing for the Fordist family is about more than the loss of family-wage jobs. Cooper chides those who would treat gender, race, and sexuality as merely “social” issues; today many people are calling Trump’s gender orders “distractions” or purely “culture war” red meat for a social conservative base. But, Bahn reminds us, “the Fordist politics of class was itself a form of identity politics inasmuch as it established white, married masculinity as a point of access to full social protection.”

The economic and the social are deeply intertwined, and while Trump and his cronies aren’t even offering the carrot of bringing back good factory jobs anymore, they’re hoping instead to force us back into the old social hierarchy—with white, married, working men on top—purely through the use of sticks. Gruberg points to a directive from Sean Duffy, Trump’s Transportation Secretary, which states that “the department’s grant and loan programs should prioritize projects in ‘communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average,’ to the extent allowed by law.”

“It’s a very specific view of what kinds of families, what kind of marriage they want,” Gruberg notes. The Family Research Council, one of the contributors to Project 2025, the rightwing blueprint for Trump’s second term, has a long history of “hand-wringing about Black children born to unmarried moms and the fatherlessness contributing to crime [and] mental illness,” she says. “They’re just doubling down on it by centralizing power and pushing this worldview through at all costs.”

It’s a politics of anxious masculinity filtered through the family: Note Trump’s Executive Order taking aim at ensuring that the Department of Defense focuses on “developing the requisite warrior ethos.” Rather than providing the kinds of things that actually incentivize childbearing—family and medical leave, paid child care, and most importantly, higher wages and stable costs of living—they’re relying on rhetoric and punishment. There is an aspect of these policies, again, that is about reinforcing dominance. And white supremacy and patriarchy are both about dominance.

It’s no surprise that the administration is joining rightwing politicians around the world in its attack on what it calls “gender ideology,” just as it does in its attacks on migrants. Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, for example, has framed his attacks on LGBTQ+ media as “child protection,” a common pose among the global far right. Declining birth rates—but only the right kind of “native” births—are an obsession, as is the fear of being replaced by immigrants, who are often portrayed as having too many children. The desire to turn back the clock on human rights is global, and while it is unlikely that any of these politicians can return us to 1945 with an Executive Order, “they can cause a tremendous amount of damage in the process, even if they don’t succeed in their goal,” Gruberg notes.

But what would it look like to really support families in 2025? Far from a warrior ethos and an end to women at work, what parents (and, importantly, children) need, Gruberg says, is equal pay and jobs free of discrimination, paid family leave and sick time, paid child care and elder care, and a raise and paid overtime. Yet conservatives have moaned over child care requirements in the CHIPS and Science Act, and made sure that the child tax credit—the Biden Administration’s flagship success for working families—was dead. Trump benefited—and Biden suffered—electorally from precisely the demographic that such policies would—and briefly did—help.

As economist J.W. Mason points out, “During 2020-2021, the federal government did more than ever before in history to support the incomes and living standards of ordinary Americans. Then it took that support away.” He adds, “When Democrats boasted, in 2021, of the largest-ever reduction in child poverty rates, was there an understanding that it would be followed, a year later, by the largest-ever increase?”

It is hard in this moment to point to a lesson beyond the obvious: that Trump is unconstrained by any belief in precedent or compromise, while Democrats often let their wins slip through their fingers, giving policies expiration dates or, Gruberg notes, calling something a “down payment” on the end goal that never comes. The Family and Medical Leave Act, for instance, just passed its thirty-second anniversary, but still provides only unpaid leave.

There is one bit of advice to take away from all of this: We do not, as the saying goes, live single-issue lives. “Communities are being connected through the shared experience of being under attack,” Gruberg says. “And the only way to effectively fight back is to recognize our shared future here and the reality that our ability to thrive and survive this relies on us working together across issues and across identities to fight for—not restoring, but advancing—more equitable policies.”

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Trump Is Killing Life-Saving Health Research

As a virologist and a former associate director of the Abramson Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania, I observed firsthand the development of various treatments and cures—a process that is complex, sometimes frustrating, and often exhilarating. Now President Donald Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are dismantling the research infrastructure that made all that progress possible.

Funding cuts, firings, and program closures at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) have left tens of thousands of dedicated professionals unable to continue their potentially life-saving work. The hopes of countless trainees for careers in science have been dashed, or at least threatened. The world’s most successful health science and public health apparatus is being shredded, putting all of us at great risk of chronic and infectious disease.

One story about the power of life science research is told in “Fire with Fire,” a 2012 short documentary about the first cure of childhood leukemia using specially designed immune cells called CAR T-cells. In this treatment, developed at the University of Pennsylvania and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, the patient’s T-cells—white blood cells that play a vital role in the immune system—are taken from the patient and isolated in the lab. There they are genetically modified to attack and kill leukemia cells before being injected back into the patient.

After the treatment, as Dr. Carl H. June of the University of Pennsylvania describes in the film, “it was like the calm after the storm, the clouds went away and she woke up and there was no leukemia.” His eyes fill with tears as he recalls this “amazing event.” The young girl in the film is now a healthy college student.

The development of CAR-T cells stretched over many years, involving labs all over the country and world. It was wonderful science—sometimes messy, sometimes brilliant, sometimes depressing, and sometimes thrilling. It involved countless experiments, each shining a glimmer of light, guiding the science to the next theory to be tested, step by step. Most of this research was funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), supporting thousands of dedicated Ph.D.s, MDs, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and research staff.

Many of these scientists, like me, came from humble backgrounds. I grew up in a paper mill town in central Pennsylvania. My father’s work at the mill made it possible for me to go to college, where science became alive for me. People may see scientists as elite and aloof professionals in their white lab coats, but we’re also your neighbors who share similar past experiences. 

CAR-T cells research represents just one example of the power of science in the United States. Over the years, research and public health initiatives have made life better for all Americans, reducing suffering from so many chronic and infectious diseases. Such an effective nationwide science infrastructure cannot be privatized; no pharmaceutical company could support even a small fraction of the infrastructure required for this type of long-term research.

Without this substantial public investment, these advances would not have occurred. The young girl with leukemia would have died. CAR-T cells would have eventually been developed in another country, years later, after too many needless deaths.

This administration is forging a fate filled with disease, suffering, and unnecessary death. We must embrace science and stop this senseless destruction while we still can.

This column was produced for Progressive Perspectives, a project of The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.

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