Responding to Crisis with Hope: Students, Families & Community Organize for Racially Just Relationship-Centered Community Schools Across California

In 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic began, we saw a crisis emerge. Schools across California closed down in response to COVID-19 and students and families lost access to schools as critical hubs of connection, community resources, and learning. This was experienced most acutely by low-income students and families of color. Members of the California Partnership for the Future of Learning responded by conducting a listening campaign with allies from across the state. This listening campaign included more than 20 grassroots education and racial-justice organizations who heard from over 600 students and families from low-income communities of color in more than 20 school districts.

The need for mental health support, accompanied by a sense of belonging and strong relationships, for access to equitable learning opportunities, and for engaging students and families as equal partners in decision-making emerged as key issues.

As a result of this listening campaign, the CA PFL began to shift focus to prioritize increased funding for transformative, racially just and relationship-centered community schools. Students, families, community, and educators developed a policy platform, which aligned with the core pillars and approach of community schools. The pandemic exposed decades of long-standing racialized systemic inequities in education with resulting gaps in opportunity and academic outcomes. However, where families, students, educators, and community built relationships and partnered, schools were better able to support students and adults alike through the crisis. Students, families, community, and educators called on policy makers to expand racially just, relationship-centered schools—which center shared power and decision-making with students, families, educators, and community to heal from the pandemic and transform the future of California.

As one Oakland student shared “We can’t go back to normal. Normal wasn’t working for a lot of people, especially students of color. We must work together with decision-makers to create a school where we are comfortable and can succeed. I don’t want to go back to a classroom, I want to go back to a community.”

Students, families, and community organizers across California leveraged decades of organizing, advocacy, and research to turn the crisis of the pandemic into an opportunity to address the impacts of intergenerational divestment and structural racism in education and move towards their transformative vision of an educational system built for us all. They spoke at legislative hearings and met with policy makers to advocate for equitable investments in transformational, relationship-centered community schools.

For example, student and family leaders, organizers and advocates honored Memorial Day 2020 by testifying at the Senate Education Budget Committee. Judith Mendez, a Spanish speaking mother of two and PICO CA Education for Liberation leader from Oakland, called on legislators “to ensure that equity is a reality, not just in words, but in action.” Jamila Rice, a youth organizer with Calfornians for Justice in Long Beach lifted the importance of investing in community schools “that provide health care to families, have smaller class sizes, that help parents learn new skills - schools that prioritize relationships with students, schools that nurture relationships with students who are arriving in this country for the first time.”

On June 29, 2020, the Governor and legislature responded by investing $45 Million in grants for sustaining or expanding community schools.

Memorial Day 2020 was also the day of George Floyd’s murder. Communities in California, across the US, and around the world expressed their pain and outrage through taking public action. The racial uprisings following the murder of George Floyd and the ongoing trauma associated with racialized killings, continued to expose the impacts of the systemic racism permeating our society. This further highlighted the critical role community schools can play in healing children and young people and transforming schools and communities. Students, families, organizers, educators, and advocates responded by elevating the urgent need for schools in every community in California to become racially just and relationship-centered community schools.

Fueled by the impacts of the dual pandemics of COVID-19 and systemic racism, families, students, community organizers and advocates across California were spurred to organize and advocate for much greater transformative investments in Black and Brown children and youth. They shifted from advocating for millions to advocating for BILLIONS of dollars in increased funding for community schools.

In June 2021, this advocacy/organizing effort contributed to an historic investment, as Governor Newsom and the California Legislature approved $3 billion in one-time community schools grant funding over 7 years.

Following the approval of the budget in June 2021, students, families, organizers and advocates shifted the focus to organizing and advocating to support strong and equitable implementation of the California Community Schools Partnership Program (CCSPP). While securing the budget allocation was an historic milestone, it was just the first step. Low-income students and families, community partners, and educators knew from experience the importance of impacting the development of the CCSPP at every level - from the school site, to the district, to the state to ensure that their vision for transformative racially just and relationship-centered community schools becomes a reality for students in thousands of schools across California.