About Tools
Welcome to our Tools section—a collection of practical instruments, methods, and materials designed to help you accomplish specific tasks and solve problems effectively. Whether you’re planning, implementing, or evaluating, these tools are here to support your work with clarity and efficiency.
Findings Report
Interest-holders and the Community School Coordinator create an engaging and easy-to-understand findings report that summarizes the data obtained from a Needs and Assets Assessment process.
Data for Equity Protocol
To identify equity gaps in our system, reflect on the conditions that create and perpetuate them, and move forward with concrete steps for understanding and interrupting inequities.
Anaheim UHSD Performance Task Assessment Template
Considerations for use: You can work through this template in any order, as you see fit. This process will be ongoing, PTAs will need to be revisited, revised, and further developed over multiple years and iterations.
Job Descriptions and Staffing
This S-TAC Resource is a list of commonly used resources related to job descriptions and staffing below for your reference.
Building Strategic Partnerships: MOUs and Other Common Agreements
Strategic community partnerships increase the capacity of community schools to work towards and achieve the aspirational vision of interest-holders by supporting and sustaining a broad continuum of priorities such as integrated student supports, family and community engagement, collaborative leadership, extended learning time and opportunities, etc.
Fresno County Superintendents of Schools: Community Schools Resources Network
This tool offers a resource directory to connect Community Schools with Community Based Organizations (CBOs). The purpose of this tool is to provide school principals, administrators, and Community Schools Coordinators in the schools with a list of organizations that offer services within the school district boundaries area.
Participatory Systems Change for Equity
The purpose of this guide is to help system leaders facilitate participatory systems change for equity. The guide is based on the idea that meaningful, liberatory, and lasting change is more likely to result when young people, families, community partners, and system leaders work side by side to design and improve child-, youth-, and family-serving systems. This guide describes elements of participatory systems change that institutions and organizations can apply depending on local context and locally defined goals.
Open Space: Innovative Approaches to Reconnecting through Community Conversations
Open Space or Open Space Technology is an opportunity to invite participants to co-create and manage their own agenda and sessions focusing on a central theme. Open Space is a participatory facilitation process that involves inviting participants to actively join the sessions that interest them and contribute to the decisions around what topics are on the agenda. During our Community of Practice session, we held conversations asking, “What is the conversation you need to have now about your community?” We then built an agenda around the answers we received.
National Equity Project: Leading for Equity Framework
National Equity Project’s Leading for Equity Framework provides a frame of reference that enables leaders to navigate the complex territory of equity challenges and to develop the capacity to engage in purposeful leadership action. In its simplest form, the Framework helps build habits of mind that are continually in practice. In its more elaborated form, it provides a set of tools, frames and processes that leaders can use in their work.
Participatory Budgeting for Organizations
Participatory budgeting (PB) is a democratic process in which community members decide how to spend part of a public budget. It gives people real power over real money.
Storytelling Project Model
The Storytelling Project Model outlines a dialogue framework that can help diverse groups collectively analyze and better understand how racism operates and impacts organizations, communities, and society.
Mapping Community Strengths and Assets
This resource describes how to take a strength- or asset-based approach and is a useful tool to help explore and capture the gifts, talents and strengths in your community.
Teacher-Powered Schools: Collaborative Leadership Self-Assessment
The purpose of this self-assessment is to guide team reflection and identify potential areas of growth. We recommend that each team member completes the assessment individually and then discuss it as a team.
The California Partnership for the Future of Learning Community Schools Toolkit
The purpose of this toolkit is to provide tools, curricula and step-by-step resources for students, families, community members, and school and district staff to apply and adapt to co-create community schools; and share stories about challenges and solutions from students, families, educators, and communities who are co-governing at school site, district, regional, and statewide levels to transform schools across California.
National School Reform Faculty: Data Analysis Protocol
Discussions around data can make people feel “on the spot” or exposed, either for themselves, their students, or their profession. The use of a structured dialogue format provides an effective technique for managing the discussion and maintaining its focus. This protocol allows participants to look at data with new eyes, and ends with possible implications, next steps, and strategies.
NEA: Building Our Pitch
The purpose of this tool is to guide educators, advocates, and school leaders in effectively communicating the vision, value, and impact of community schools in a concise and engaging way. It provides a clear structure—a “pitch”—to help speakers explain what community schools are, why they matter, what they do, and how others can get involved.
Coalition for Community Schools: Community Schools Communications Toolkit
The Coalition for Community Schools, an initiative of the Institute for Educational Leadership, has developed this communications toolkit as the go-to resource for materials for effectively communicating the transformative impact of Community Schools. As advocates for comprehensive and community-driven education, the Coalition understands the importance of clear, compelling messaging. This information can guide organizers and supporters of the Community Schools movement in outreach to communities and lawmakers.