Our Story

On May 18, 2022, the California State Board of Education announced that four organizations – the Alameda County Office of Education (ACOE), UCLA Center for Community Schooling, Californians for Justice (CFJ), and National Education Association (NEA)– will serve as the State Technical Assistance Center (S-TAC) for the California Community Schools Partnership Program (CCSPP). As a team, we were asked to deliver six elements of support for grantees across the state: (1) technical assistance content, guided by an overarching methodology; (2) an implementation rubric; (3) a community of practice among the regional technical assistance centers; (4) a way to coordinate and maximize the expertise of these centers; (5) support for the state to collect and analyze data; and (6) alignment of our work with the Statewide System of Support. Much like the work of developing a community school, we faced the daunting task of bringing together different partners and programs in a way that lifted up the state’s assets and responded to its needs.

Initially we decided to rebrand our mission and renamed ourselves the State Transformational Assistance Center to signal that the Community Schools strategy represents a collaborative and innovative approach to public schooling. We challenged ourselves to imagine ways to help people think differently about change–away from the implementation of a discrete program and towards the reimagining of schools as communities capable of disrupting social inequality. This reimagining work ran alongside the need to develop a contract with the state, hire staff, assemble an advisory board, deliver webinars, create a weekly collective learning space, and convene county office staff in a community of transformative practice as the regional centers were established.

Just as community schools do, we spent our first retreat together reflecting and sharing our strengths and experiences combating structural racism and poverty to identify what actions were needed to provide transformational assistance for the emerging community schools movement in California. We leveraged feedback from the advisory board to reframe our approach to the work at hand as an opportunity not a problem to solve. In small groups at our first retreat, we charted and discussed how our work must celebrate and leverage California’s historic investment in equity-focused whole child reforms such as universal preschool, school based health, Golden State Pathways and other allied efforts. We wanted to help these allied reforms land and root in the context of community schools so the massive public investment could be felt for generations to come. In six years, our State Transformational Assistance Center wants to look back at the multiple communities across the great state of California that have come together–not to implement a new program but to reimagine the promise of their young people.

Meet the State Transformational Assistance Team!