The Center for Popular Democracy (CPD) and its partner organizations continue to promote the community school movement as the public school solution to privatizing and subsequently de-democratizing public education in the United States. In April we spent nearly a week in Albuquerque, New Mexico, for the Coalition for Community Schools (CCS)’s biennial conference to connect and plan for expanding, fortifying, and deepening community schools around the country.

CPD and the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools (AROS)—to which CPD belongs along with the American Federation of Teachers, the National Education Association, and other organizing and policy networks—have been acknowledged for breathing fresh air into the community schools movement. In 2014, we brought hundreds of advocates and activists to the CCS conference in Cincinnati. This year, CPD partner organizations represented again among the 1700 community-schoolers from around the country.

In attendance were Neighborhoods Organizing for Change in Minneapolis, Wisconsin Jobs Now! in Milwaukee, Texas Organizing Project in Dallas, Communities United in Baltimore, Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment in LA, and friends and allies from AROS local tables in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Newark, New York City and New York State, and Colorado. Also representing were our many practitioner friends from Orlando, Baltimore, Kentucky, and others profiled in our recent report, Community Schools: Transforming Struggling Schools into Thriving Schools.

Highlights from this year’s conference included meetings of teachers, principals, organizing groups, practitioners, providers, school district and elected officials, grouped by state affiliation. Pennsylvania’s meeting featured newly appointed Secretary of Education, Pedro Rivera, who is moving to create a senior position in his office to specifically focused on building community schools statewide. Rivera stressed a joint commitment on the state level—including cabinet members from health and housing—prioritizing education at the state level. We’re now seeing additional top-down momentum complement the bottom-up work of our Pennsylvania partner organizations; Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney is making good on his promise to Action United of 25 community schools by 2018 and the Pittsburgh Board of Education is poised to move a community schools resolution, while AROS groups, including CPD’s Action United and One Pittsburgh, continue to organize in multiple schools and communities. 

To take full of advantage of networking and cooperative opportunities, AROS hosted an informal evening to build and consolidate relationships among our members from around the country, who gathered to discuss their successes and challenges within their local communities. AROS also ran a workshop featuring Executive Director Keron Blair and Barbara Gross from the Annenberg Institute for School Reform. Natasha Capers from Coalition for Educational Justice in NYC and Ken Zarafis from Education Austin offered presentations from a local organizing perspective. 

Together, these workshops, speakers, and networking opportunities worked to inspire academics and practitioners—offering them new tools, research, and philosophies to build the shared dream of equitable, quality schools for all of our communities across the country.