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“I don’t see how kids can focus on learning if they are hungry or their clothing smells because their families don’t have access to laundry facilities,” says Mikala Everett. She is a community school director at United Community Schools (UCS), a local nonprofit organization created by the United Federation of Teachers that operates the largest network of community schools in New York City. She currently works on-site at PS 196K the Williamsburg Bridge Magnet School in Brooklyn, where she routinely encounters obstacles that get in the way of learning, such as poverty, food insecurity, and family joblessness.
“We have a lot of homelessness and food insecurity in the neighborhood,” Everett tells The Progressive, describing a section of East Williamsburg that is undergoing rapid gentrification. “Many of our parents are first generation immigrants, who often don’t speak English. Many of them lack opportunities and need help with basic things for living in the city, such as metro cards, health care, and legal services.”
Williamsburg Bridge Magnet is one of 421 schools in the district’s Community Schools Initiative started in 2014 during the administration of former Mayor Bill de Blasio. The initiative is one of many efforts across the country to implement the community schools approach, a strategy that seeks to improve student academic outcomes by addressing the broad conditions of students and families, including their health and well-being, their economic and cultural conditions, and their social-emotional needs. The strategy relies on asking families about their needs and interests and developing partnerships between schools and local service providers to address those needs and interests.
While some may question whether schools should focus on anything other than academics, Everett firmly believes a holistic approach to education is necessary for students to succeed academically. Proponents of the community schools approach argue that it makes sense to locate child and family services in schools because that’s where children and families are.
When PS 196K started its community schools implementation eight years ago, Everett says, the emphasis was mostly on academics, bringing in new partners to create instructional programs for arts education, STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math), after-school tutoring in reading and math, and a hydroponic gardening lab. The school also increased its offerings in Advanced Placement courses that can qualify for college credit.
“But the first step in any community schools implementation is to talk to the community and learn its strengths and weaknesses to make sure you’re proposing solutions to genuine problems,” Everett says. When she was hired in 2021, the lingering impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic posed challenges to parents and teachers that were not strictly academic, which persuaded the school to add new family resources, including a food pantry; mental health services; and a commissary with school supplies, clothing, and cleaning supplies. More recently, the school started providing vision screenings and dental services.
“Academics is the central focus of the community schools approach,” says Allison Brown, who works in the same role as Everett at PS 14Q the Fairview School in the Queens Borough of New York City. “But students need to have adequate sleep and nutrition, and they need to feel loved and supported before any learning can happen. So academics is the focus, but that’s all connected to everything else.”
Located in the Corona neighborhood, the K-5 school serves a high proportion of recent immigrant families—Brown says 95 percent are Hispanic and many speak only Spanish. There’s “a lot of poverty,” and a high percentage of students live in temporary housing. Many families are “doubled up,” meaning they live in close quarters with other families, sometimes sleeping up to eight individuals in a single bedroom, she says. This makes it almost impossible for students to do schoolwork at home or have stable household routines. Parents often work irregular hours. She knows of at least ten families living in shelters. Many individuals and families in the community also face food insecurity.
When she arrived at the Fairview School more than three years ago, Brown, a former social worker, advocated to adopt the community schools approach to address the economic and social conditions in the neighborhood that made teachers’ jobs so much more difficult. “Generally, teachers are not trained to address these challenges,” she says.
Teachers readily welcomed the idea, the school’s leadership was on board, and Fairview became a community school in September 2023. Results from their first outreach to the community persuaded Brown and her colleagues to strengthen and expand the school’s family services, which include food and clothing assistance, after-school activities, health and mental health services, and vision screenings with free glasses.
Some early indicators that New York City’s adoption of the community schools approach might be “bearing fruit,” Chalkbeat reported in 2020, emerged in a study by RAND that found schools using the strategy brought about “improvements in attendance, graduation rates, math scores, and the rate at which students advance to the next grade level.”
But practitioners of the community schools approach in the city have noticed another important outcome.
“Our school is an island of consistency in a rapidly changing neighborhood,” says Everett. The 102-year-old institution is “an example of a school where people who grew up here in the neighborhood and attended the school now send their kids here. Staff at the school generally live in the community,” she says. “So even as student demographics change, our school has become a stronghold for families and communities. And the community schools approach is an idea that reinforces that constancy but can also allow for adaptation over time.”
“I’ve watched families decide to transfer to a charter school or try homeschooling, only to return the next year,” Everett says. “They realize that the services and access to programs they had at our school are no longer there in their communities, and they’re no longer being treated with the same level of care as they were in the public school system.”
Similarly, Brown describes her school as located in “a community that is in constant change.” She credits the community schools approach for providing “an anchor of support for families,” while “having the flexibility to keep up.”
“Care is a hallmark of the community school idea,” says Brown, and people feel more invested in a school they see as a safe and caring space that listens and responds to people’s needs.
That aspect of the community schools approach fits it squarely into what political analysts and journalists are calling “neighborism.” That idea comes from a growing realization that in a political system that is increasingly indifferent to the daily needs and struggles of families and sees individuals’ worth only in economic terms—or, as in the case of education, their outcomes on standardized tests—the alternative is to create local systems of care and civic engagement that uplift neighborhoods, prioritize community relationships, and cultivate local resources.
The term neighborism was first coined by journalist Adam Serwer to describe the organizing ethic he saw at work in grassroots resistance to immigrant crackdowns conducted by the Trump administration’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
“If the Minnesota resistance has an overarching ideology, you could call it ‘neighborism,’ ” Serwer wrote for The Atlantic, which he described as “a commitment to protecting the people around you, no matter who they are or where they came from. The contrast with the philosophy guiding the Trump Administration couldn’t be more extreme.”
Serwer expanded on his description of neighborism in an interview with NPR reporter Brittany Luse in January, saying he found the idea of being committed to the safety and welfare of the people in your community, no matter who they are and where they come from, and using that as a basis for collective action, “sort of profoundly moving because it’s such a universalist sentiment. It really reminds me . . . of the best of American ideals.”
Naomi Klein, an author and prominent social activist, picked up on Serwer’s idea in her conversation with New York Times columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein when their discussion turned to the topic of how to bring working families and communities back into the progressive coalition.
“I mean, neighborism is such a welcoming idea,” she said. “You’re just saying: We are all neighbors here, wherever you’re from. If you’re here, we’ve got your back. And we’re going to express that in all these different ways—whether it’s doing laundry for people who can’t leave their homes or dropping kids off at school or the images we’ve all seen of people trailing ICE and filming them. These are just acts of neighborliness and welcomingness, and there’s a simplicity to it.”
Unfortunately, there’s an influential politically-centrist faction, mostly within the Democratic Party, that is desperate to take education policy back to an emphasis on what they call “achievement,” but what is essentially scores on standardized tests.
While that sort of rhetoric plays well in highly-funded think tanks supported by the donor class, there doesn’t appear to be a lot of demand for more testing and get-tough-on-local-schools measures in working class communities in New York City. Instead, educators at these schools want to see policies developed from the ground up, with an emphasis on building positive and trusting relationships with families and communities. The community schools idea meets that need.
“When I came to the school,” Everett says, “I could see that there were deep fractures in parent-school relationships.” But as the community schools idea became more entrenched in the neighborhood, she says, parents put more trust in the school, they became more engaged, and they spent more time there.
“Many of the problems we face in education are the result of not engaging with local communities,” Brown says. “Policies have been too top down. But community schools are the intervention that schools—and maybe even the whole society—needs.”
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to clarify the offerings at PS 196K.