Lincoln Elementary and the Rise of the Community Schools Model
“It was unreal,” says Mukta Sambrani, principal of Lincoln Elementary, a campus in the heart of Oakland, California’s Chinatown. When the country—and its schools—ground to a halt in February 2020, Sambrani had little turnaround time to figure out how to switch her entire school from in-person learning to virtual instruction.
Lincoln Elementary wasn’t alone, of course. Educators, principals, and school districts nationwide were wrestling with the same state of uncertainty, but that offered Sambrani cold comfort—and little guidance—in the early stages of the emergency. Nothing was easy or obvious at a time when information on the novel coronavirus was scarce—and shifting.
Unsure how long the COVID-19 pandemic would last, schools had to try to replicate the supportive environments they’ve built at their brick-and-mortar schools in a virtual context. This meant instead of being able to read a student’s body language to support them or greet them with a handshake at the door of their classrooms, teachers had to find ways of connecting through screens, miles away from their students.
As a result, many—officially or not—turned to a “Community Schools” model.
Community schools focus on supporting students holistically, meeting their full range of needs. School leaders team up with nonprofits, businesses, volunteers, and community organizations to provide services such as tutoring, health care, mental health counseling, afterschool programs, and more resources that fit the community’s needs. In essence, the school serves as a hub for academic instruction and wraparound services.
School leaders team up with nonprofits, businesses, volunteers, and community organizations to provide services such as tutoring, health care, mental health counseling, afterschool programs, and more resources that fit the community’s needs.
For years, researchers and education leaders have known that a student’s circumstances outside of school impact how they do in schools. As the COVID-19 pandemic further blurred the lines between students’ homes and classrooms, it drove many schools, districts, and policymakers to prioritize meeting students’ full range of needs.
Lincoln Elementary School in Oakland, California. Source: Lincoln Elementary School.
Lincoln Elementary, a long-historied campus, has dealt with global health emergencies before. Rewind to 1918, in the height of the flu pandemic: Lincoln worked with community volunteers to provide 200 meals to students and their families daily. A century later, as the COVID-19 pandemic began, Lincoln again worked to support students and families’ needs. Indeed, though many years separate the two pandemics, community connections have remained part of the school’s DNA. Many of the school’s families have multigenerational connections to the campus, and a multitude of alumni now serve as volunteers.
So when the COVID-19 arrived, Lincoln got down to work.
Lincoln Elementary School’s Community-Based Approach
To launch virtual learning, Lincoln provided hotspots, notebook computers, and weekly technical support. But educators soon realized that this wasn’t enough to ensure fair access for all families, so the school teamed up with their next-door neighbor, the Lincoln Square Recreation Center to host distance learning spaces. This meant that students who could not engage with virtual learning in their homes were still able to participate in a (socially distanced) space that was conducive to learning.
To keep students eating enough—and eating healthily—Lincoln worked with the East Bay Asian Youth Center (EBAYC) food bank to do meal drop-offs in Chinatown each week. Due to Oakland Unified School District (OUSD)’s commitment to becoming the first full-service Community School District in the country in 2011, EBAYC and Lincoln Elementary School already had an established partnership prior to the pandemic, smoothing this transition. Each Wednesday, the EBAYC director for Lincoln Elementary went into the neighborhood areas most densely populated with students and dropped off groceries.
To address potential declines in literacy rates, the school contracted a literacy coach to train high school- and college-aged EBAYC volunteers to help young students with their reading over Zoom. Lincoln administrators believed this was particularly urgent, as studies show that the overwhelming majority of students who fall behind in their literacy development by first grade tend to struggle academically throughout their K–12 experience. In addition to training volunteer tutors, the school provided bookbags full of reading materials each Thursday to students identified in need of reading intervention. And then, throughout the week, students had virtual appointments with their (recently trained) tutors to mitigate the absence of in-person reading instruction.
In addition to training volunteer tutors, the school provided bookbags full of reading materials each Thursday to students identified in need of reading intervention.
In 2023, though pandemic regulations have eased nationwide and virtual learning has ended in essentially all communities, the full extent of pandemic-driven damage to students’ development is still being uncovered. In response, Lincoln Elementary has deepened its commitment to the Community Schools model.
When the campus reopened, Lincoln staff and administrators saw that virtual learning not only took a hit on students’ academic performance but also on their ability to socialize with classmates. “They became dependent on a two-dimensional medium, which made it really hard for them to practice what authentic in-person interactions actually are,” says Sambrani. To address this, Lincoln Elementary used part of a new California Community Schools Partnership Program (CCSPP) grant provided by Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) to invest in a place where students socialize the most—the playground. Lincoln purchased multiplayer games like Connect 4, Jenga, and Tic Tac Toe to intentionally facilitate socialization between students.
Students at Lincoln Elementary School play with equipment funded by the California Community Partnership Program grant. Source: Jonathan Zabala.
Lincoln also has expanded their partnership with Asian Health Services, a local health provider, to provide continued health care to support family well-being as COVID-19 infections continued. While some U.S. schools treat the pandemic as a thing of the past, Lincoln doesn’t have that luxury. In Chinatown, most students live in multifamily, intergenerational homes. This can make it easier for the virus to spread from children to older, more vulnerable family members. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, Lincoln has retained near universal masking on campus—with little pushback from the community. To combat the continued spread of COVID-19, the school even now holds weekly vaccine clinics each Wednesday with the help of the local medical center to ensure one case doesn’t multiply and requires a school wide quarantine.
While some U.S. schools treat the pandemic as a thing of the past, Lincoln doesn’t have that luxury.
In these and myriad other ways, Lincoln is smoothing the pandemic’s stubbornly long ending for families by providing community services that engage the full range of the community’s needs. Lincoln Elementary’s work with outside organizations throughout the pandemic shows the promise of the Community Schools model moving forward.
Community Schools: The New Normal
One day, with adequate resources and thoughtful policy design, community schools like Lincoln Elementary could be the new national normal for U.S. public education.
While increased use of technology in classrooms at the K–12 level is the most visible impact of the pandemic, the crisis also put schools at the center of providing a wider range of community health, nutrition, and other social support for families. The COVID-19 pandemic made it clearer than ever that student success at school is deeply intertwined with students’ broader well-being. As a result, policymakers and education leaders are starting to emphasize the importance of students’ well-being.
At the local level, Lincoln is just one example out of the many schools supporting their students beyond academic instruction. Whether they are officially titled a Community School or not, campuses across the country have renewed their focus on this sort of “whole-child” approach.
Whether they are officially titled a Community School or not, campuses across the country have renewed their focus on this sort of “whole-child” approach.
At the state level, thirty-nine bills were introduced in state legislatures in support of expanding community schools in 2022. California has dedicated $3 billion across five years to support the Community Schools model in low-income communities across the state. Arizona, Hawaii, Mississippi, and six other states are also currently building grant programs to fund community schools.
At the federal level, the amount of money for Community School programs doubled from $75 million for FY2022 to $150 million for FY2023. In January 2023, the U.S. Department of Education announced $63 million in new five-year Full-Service Community Schools (FCSC) Grants to support forty-two local education agencies, nonprofits, and other organizations supporting the Community Schools model for FY2022. This is the most money ever spent in the history of the FCSC program.
The pandemic has made it clear that schools can serve a dual purpose as institutions of academic instruction and as facilitators of student and family wraparound support. Indeed, it has hammered home the fact that student academic success and social-emotional well-being are intertwined in a single, organic project of human development. Supporting this includes providing high-quality academic instruction, targeted interventions to close academic gaps, and also health clinics, counselors and more to ensure students’ social, emotional, and physical needs are met.
While many pandemic efforts were one-time, isolated supports, the Community Schools model appears to be here to stay.
Jonathan Zabala was a senior policy associate at The Century Foundation, where he worked on issues related to educational equity, English language learners, and dual language immersion programs.
Lincoln Elementary and the Rise of the Community Schools Model
“It was unreal,” says Mukta Sambrani, principal of Lincoln Elementary, a campus in the heart of Oakland, California’s Chinatown. When the country—and its schools—ground to a halt in February 2020, Sambrani had little turnaround time to figure out how to switch her entire school from in-person learning to virtual instruction.
Lincoln Elementary wasn’t alone, of course. Educators, principals, and school districts nationwide were wrestling with the same state of uncertainty, but that offered Sambrani cold comfort—and little guidance—in the early stages of the emergency. Nothing was easy or obvious at a time when information on the novel coronavirus was scarce—and shifting.
Unsure how long the COVID-19 pandemic would last, schools had to try to replicate the supportive environments they’ve built at their brick-and-mortar schools in a virtual context. This meant instead of being able to read a student’s body language to support them or greet them with a handshake at the door of their classrooms, teachers had to find ways of connecting through screens, miles away from their students.
As a result, many—officially or not—turned to a “Community Schools” model.
Community schools focus on supporting students holistically, meeting their full range of needs. School leaders team up with nonprofits, businesses, volunteers, and community organizations to provide services such as tutoring, health care, mental health counseling, afterschool programs, and more resources that fit the community’s needs. In essence, the school serves as a hub for academic instruction and wraparound services.
For years, researchers and education leaders have known that a student’s circumstances outside of school impact how they do in schools. As the COVID-19 pandemic further blurred the lines between students’ homes and classrooms, it drove many schools, districts, and policymakers to prioritize meeting students’ full range of needs.
Lincoln Elementary, a long-historied campus, has dealt with global health emergencies before. Rewind to 1918, in the height of the flu pandemic: Lincoln worked with community volunteers to provide 200 meals to students and their families daily. A century later, as the COVID-19 pandemic began, Lincoln again worked to support students and families’ needs. Indeed, though many years separate the two pandemics, community connections have remained part of the school’s DNA. Many of the school’s families have multigenerational connections to the campus, and a multitude of alumni now serve as volunteers.
So when the COVID-19 arrived, Lincoln got down to work.
Lincoln Elementary School’s Community-Based Approach
To launch virtual learning, Lincoln provided hotspots, notebook computers, and weekly technical support. But educators soon realized that this wasn’t enough to ensure fair access for all families, so the school teamed up with their next-door neighbor, the Lincoln Square Recreation Center to host distance learning spaces. This meant that students who could not engage with virtual learning in their homes were still able to participate in a (socially distanced) space that was conducive to learning.
To keep students eating enough—and eating healthily—Lincoln worked with the East Bay Asian Youth Center (EBAYC) food bank to do meal drop-offs in Chinatown each week. Due to Oakland Unified School District (OUSD)’s commitment to becoming the first full-service Community School District in the country in 2011, EBAYC and Lincoln Elementary School already had an established partnership prior to the pandemic, smoothing this transition. Each Wednesday, the EBAYC director for Lincoln Elementary went into the neighborhood areas most densely populated with students and dropped off groceries.
To address potential declines in literacy rates, the school contracted a literacy coach to train high school- and college-aged EBAYC volunteers to help young students with their reading over Zoom. Lincoln administrators believed this was particularly urgent, as studies show that the overwhelming majority of students who fall behind in their literacy development by first grade tend to struggle academically throughout their K–12 experience. In addition to training volunteer tutors, the school provided bookbags full of reading materials each Thursday to students identified in need of reading intervention. And then, throughout the week, students had virtual appointments with their (recently trained) tutors to mitigate the absence of in-person reading instruction.
In 2023, though pandemic regulations have eased nationwide and virtual learning has ended in essentially all communities, the full extent of pandemic-driven damage to students’ development is still being uncovered. In response, Lincoln Elementary has deepened its commitment to the Community Schools model.
When the campus reopened, Lincoln staff and administrators saw that virtual learning not only took a hit on students’ academic performance but also on their ability to socialize with classmates. “They became dependent on a two-dimensional medium, which made it really hard for them to practice what authentic in-person interactions actually are,” says Sambrani. To address this, Lincoln Elementary used part of a new California Community Schools Partnership Program (CCSPP) grant provided by Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) to invest in a place where students socialize the most—the playground. Lincoln purchased multiplayer games like Connect 4, Jenga, and Tic Tac Toe to intentionally facilitate socialization between students.
Lincoln also has expanded their partnership with Asian Health Services, a local health provider, to provide continued health care to support family well-being as COVID-19 infections continued. While some U.S. schools treat the pandemic as a thing of the past, Lincoln doesn’t have that luxury. In Chinatown, most students live in multifamily, intergenerational homes. This can make it easier for the virus to spread from children to older, more vulnerable family members. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, Lincoln has retained near universal masking on campus—with little pushback from the community. To combat the continued spread of COVID-19, the school even now holds weekly vaccine clinics each Wednesday with the help of the local medical center to ensure one case doesn’t multiply and requires a school wide quarantine.
In these and myriad other ways, Lincoln is smoothing the pandemic’s stubbornly long ending for families by providing community services that engage the full range of the community’s needs. Lincoln Elementary’s work with outside organizations throughout the pandemic shows the promise of the Community Schools model moving forward.
Community Schools: The New Normal
One day, with adequate resources and thoughtful policy design, community schools like Lincoln Elementary could be the new national normal for U.S. public education.
While increased use of technology in classrooms at the K–12 level is the most visible impact of the pandemic, the crisis also put schools at the center of providing a wider range of community health, nutrition, and other social support for families. The COVID-19 pandemic made it clearer than ever that student success at school is deeply intertwined with students’ broader well-being. As a result, policymakers and education leaders are starting to emphasize the importance of students’ well-being.
At the local level, Lincoln is just one example out of the many schools supporting their students beyond academic instruction. Whether they are officially titled a Community School or not, campuses across the country have renewed their focus on this sort of “whole-child” approach.
At the state level, thirty-nine bills were introduced in state legislatures in support of expanding community schools in 2022. California has dedicated $3 billion across five years to support the Community Schools model in low-income communities across the state. Arizona, Hawaii, Mississippi, and six other states are also currently building grant programs to fund community schools.
At the federal level, the amount of money for Community School programs doubled from $75 million for FY2022 to $150 million for FY2023. In January 2023, the U.S. Department of Education announced $63 million in new five-year Full-Service Community Schools (FCSC) Grants to support forty-two local education agencies, nonprofits, and other organizations supporting the Community Schools model for FY2022. This is the most money ever spent in the history of the FCSC program.
The pandemic has made it clear that schools can serve a dual purpose as institutions of academic instruction and as facilitators of student and family wraparound support. Indeed, it has hammered home the fact that student academic success and social-emotional well-being are intertwined in a single, organic project of human development. Supporting this includes providing high-quality academic instruction, targeted interventions to close academic gaps, and also health clinics, counselors and more to ensure students’ social, emotional, and physical needs are met.
While many pandemic efforts were one-time, isolated supports, the Community Schools model appears to be here to stay.
Tags: k-12, education access, community school