Lessons Learned & Shared: Lancaster School District workshop offers guidance on the Community Schools journey
Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither was the perfect community school.
But if anyone exemplifies the meaning of innovative implementation solutions for the Community Schools Model, it’s Lancaster School District.
Located an hour north of Los Angeles in the Antelope Valley and serving 15,000 students, Lancaster was awarded $30.4M based on their 2023 application to the California Community Schools Partnership Program (CCSPP).
Through a number of strategic and creative initiatives, Lancaster’s five-year funding plan is empowering their commitment to help the whole-child and the entire community thrive.
Data-Driven Decisions: How Lancaster identified their need for CCSPP support
With the goal to offer guidance and insight on the CCSPP journey, Lancaster leaders collaborated with Sown To Grow to host a November 2024 workshop consisting of site visits and peer learning sessions for K-12 student support administrators from nine different southern California school districts.
To debrief the site visits, Sam Yuom, Director of Student and Family Programs, began with a data-driven breakdown of Lancaster’s ‘why’.
“Look, this is the reality of the community we serve,” Yuom said. “This study was done and it was shared to put a spotlight on some of the barriers our students are facing.”
The Road to Progress: Lancaster’s must-learn lessons from year 1-2 of CCSPP
Plans Into Action
Similar to many districts aspiring to apply to the CCSPP, some of Lancaster’s major challenges are chronic absenteeism, lack of sufficient housing and transportation, and a shortage of accessible health care. Once funding kicked in, the district began to tackle these issues by focusing on pillar 1 of the California Community Schools Framework.
As seen during the site visits, two of Lancaster’s major CCSPP-driven projects include a new district vaccine clinic, and wellness/resource center—complete with a mini food bank, clothing, diapers, and a family laundry facility.
Designed to maximize ease and accessibility, both resources are centrally housed within the district enrollment center. Along with cultivating a sense of community, this eliminates transportation problems and provider shortages experienced outside the district. With the help of 15+ partner organizations, this hub offers a range of equitable access to services including eye exams, glasses, dental work, oral health education and more.
Every Voice Heard
These kinds of projects would not be possible without the support and empathy of the community school liaisons, who possess their own lived experience in the region and a shared understanding of its needs and assets. With these unique insights, the district is better enabled to fulfill its vision for transformation.
Gauging impact on these initiatives is vital, so the district partners with Sown To Grow to lift student voice. Through the platform’s easy and engaging check-ins, personalized feedback, and built-in SEL curriculum, Lancaster educators are improving students’ social, emotional, and academic well-being.
Offering this routine opportunity to share feelings also helps foster a sense of belonging, gain a pulse on the community, highlight success stories, and determine the need to refine or redirect plans.
One Day At A Time
With so many projects happening simultaneously, Yuom advises that it can be helpful to take a step back and view the Community Schools process as incremental.
“You can’t just say, ‘hey let’s go do the work,’” Yuom stated. “You’ve got to build the capacity.”
This is just one of the many lessons learned by Lancaster leaders during the first year of implementation, said Dr. Jordan Goines, Director of Continuous Improvement, Compliance and Accountability, who also urged leaders to learn from his team’s initial issue of duplicating efforts across departments.
"Alignment of resources and alignment of systems is probably the biggest deal,” Dr. Goines explained. “If you bring all the [student services] meetings together, then you maximize your impact, you maximize the amount of people contributing, and you take a heck of a lot of stress off the person having to deliver the information and having to receive it. There should be one cohesive discussion with a common message to push out to the rest of the system.”
CCSPP in 2024 & Beyond: What’s next for Lancaster, and why they’ve inspired others to apply
As a result of these learnings, Lancaster leaders approached the second year of implementation with added confidence. Although future plans are still evolving, their achievements so far inspired several CCSPP-hopefuls such as Julie Hirst, Director of Student Intervention and Attendance from Snowline Joint Unified School District.
“It was really refreshing to go into these schools and see that it’s a lot of the same work we’re already doing, and it’s not as overwhelming as I thought it was going to be,” said Hirst during Lancaster’s site visit debrief. “…I really was impressed with the consistency across the classrooms, the practices focusing on school climate, the social emotional learning lessons. I thought that was kind of amazing to see everyone so focused on kids here.”
As observed, the district has truly excelled in its commitment to ‘provide safe, inclusive learning spaces where the whole child is educated, nurtured, and inspired.’
“Every decision that we make has to come back to this,” Yuom said. “The Commitment Statement frames everything that we do.”
There are three and a half years left for Lancaster’s grant-fueled community schools transformation, but the best is yet to come.
“To be honest with you, we have not yet arrived,” Yuom remarked. “We continue to tweak, tweak, tweak…It’s not easy work. I guarantee it. You’re constantly having to pivot, trying to figure things out. But the goal is that when you’re doing these types of events and making connections, we see those happy faces, and it’s worth it.”
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The FINAL Cohort of the California Community Schools Partnership Program (CCSPP) grant application is due on February 7th. Don’t miss this last opportunity to secure millions in dedicated funding to transform student support.
As a community schools partner, we’ve generated $300M in Community Schools funding awarded to 25+ LEAs through our expert guidance, and we're here to provide the technical assistance you need to turn your vision into reality.
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