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“It’s just gotten worse,” Catherine Gilmore said when I asked her how her community was faring since we last spoke. In May 2021, I interviewed Gilmore, the community school coordinator at Gibsonton Elementary School, about how her Tampa Bay-area school was able to significantly improve its state performance ranking during the COVID-19 pandemic. At that time, she and her colleagues were focused on how best to help families during the pandemic by tracking their well-being, keeping them connected to the school via personal outreach and technology, and ensuring their access to basic necessities like food, clean clothes, housing, and medical care. It was hard to believe things could have gotten worse since then.
“Housing and food costs have gone way up,” she said when I spoke to her in June 2025, “and more families are asking us for help in addressing multiple issues, including mental health.”
Gibsonton, an unincorporated, semi-rural community near East Tampa, “doesn’t have the services and structures in place to address these issues,” according to Gilmore, “so our school needs to provide that.”
Fortunately for local families, Gibsonton Elementary had adopted what is known as a “community schools” approach in 2018, with the aim of establishing systems and structures to bring vital programs and services—including physical and mental health services, dental and vision care, afterschool programs, and new learning opportunities for students and parents—into the schools.
During the pandemic, Gilmore told me, having the community schools approach in place with a dedicated coordinator to manage it was critical. This remains true today, as educators seek to address major impediments to learning that have persisted in the aftermath of the pandemic, such as inflated costs, chronic student absenteeism, and deteriorated mental health.
“Through community schools and the system it creates, we were better able to help families during the pandemic,” Gilmore told me. “And that’s still true today.”
“Back in 2020, our school pantry was serving around twenty-five families a month,” she said. “In May 2025, we had 533 families use the pantry. We expanded our space and our offerings to include hygiene supplies and a broader selection of clothing. Our pantry is also giving away more fruit and vegetables than ever, between 8,000 to 11,000 pounds every month.”
Gilmore and her colleagues have also had to manage the impact of Hurricanes Milton and Helene, as well as other catastrophic storms that hit Florida in 2024. Through partnerships with local nonprofits and businesses that her school built through the community school approach, the school was able to provide bedding, clothing, food, and health care supplies to Gibsonton Elementary families as well as neighbors in the community who do not have children enrolled in the schools.
“The community schools approach is all about building positive relationships with students and families,” Gilmore said, “which gives schools an advantage when emergencies strike.”
The same can also be said of another rural school, King Elementary School in Deer River, Minnesota, which similarly rose to the occasion to aid students and parents impacted by the pandemic through the community schools approach.
As fellow contributor to The Progressive Sarah Lahm reported for AlterNet in 2021, Deer River Public Schools—a district serving an area spanning more than 500 square miles, including the Leech Lake Reservation of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe—had to quickly shift away from a more conventional school model to ensure that families could meet basic needs such as health and dental care, food security, and access to technology and reliable transportation.
Lahm spoke with Deanna Hron, the community schools coordinator at King Elementary, who explained how her school, during the pandemic, ensured parents had access to transportation, health care services, groceries, and even supplies like fishing poles and bait so families could catch their dinner in the many freshwater lakes that dot the area. Because of King Elementary’s adoption of the community schools approach, she reported, it “had more tools in place” to address the challenges posed by the pandemic even after schools reopened and case numbers decreased.
When I spoke with Hron recently, she told me that the district has continued its community schools approach and is now expanding it into the high school to help address barriers to learning that students and families in the area continue to face.
“One reason we’ve continued to use the community schools model is because so many students and families in our school still don’t have their basic needs being met,” she said. “And anytime you’re eliminating barriers for students to learn, it’s a good thing.”
One of the most difficult barriers is helping families get access to health care services in this sprawling, rural community. “Having a dentist on call has been a huge positive asset we’ve added,” according to Hron. Providing access to eye exams and glasses is also critical, she said. But the “ultimate goal,” she maintained, is to ensure every student has health insurance.
According to Hron, as a result of their efforts to bring health services to King Elementary’s 262 students, this year, seventy-nine students got new glasses or made dental appointments they otherwise would not have been able to access, and thirteen students are now enrolled in health insurance for the first time.
Another post-pandemic challenge has been the continued lack of access to nutritious food and reliable transportation for many families. To address these challenges, Hron said the school conducted 1,328 family check-ins and food deliveries and 168 transportation appointments this year alone.
But a newer post-pandemic challenge that Hron and her colleagues have had to contend with is the level of chronic absenteeism among students, which is higher than the pre-pandemic level.
“Chronic absenteeism is a major problem,” Hron said. “Our school focuses a lot of our teacher professional development on instructional improvement, but kids need to be in school in order for that improvement to make a difference.”
King Elementary is not alone in this struggle. New data from researchers at the University of Southern California and Texas Tech University shows that in North Carolina, Texas, and Virginia, the rate of chronic absenteeism among students rose from 17 percent before the pandemic to 37 percent in 2023. Likewise, a 2024 article in The New York Times cited an analysis of chronic absentee rates from forty states and Washington, D.C., that found “an estimated 26 percent of public school students were considered chronically absent, up from 15 percent before the pandemic.”
But Hron believes that her school’s use of the community schools approach gives it considerable advantages. “As a community school, we have an advantage in that our focus is already on the whole child and on addressing root causes of barriers to learning,” she said, “so when students are chronically absent, we ask, ‘Is it the child or the parent at the heart of the issue? Is there a health care problem, or is it transportation?’ Then we look for a person to lead the effort and decide whether the outreach should be a phone call or a home visit.”
What doesn’t work, Hron said, is punishing students and families, a common practice which, according to her, erodes trust in the school.
Although her school has employed a number of tactics to address absenteeism and tardiness—including securing a second van run each day for students who miss the bus, handing out refrigerator magnets with a message about the importance of getting to school on time, and holding pizza parties and other special events to reward perfect attendance—the real key, according to her, is to take it one family at a time.
Hron believes that this approach is working at King Elementary. She described anecdotal evidence such as the story of a student who missed seventy days of kindergarten, but only two days the next year in first grade. Another student, she recalls, was often absent or late because so many people in her household had to share the same bathroom in the morning that there was no longer hot water for her shower by the time she was able to use it. “We called the residence to explain that she should be among the first in the house to shower each morning,” she says, and notes that the conversation seemed to have solved the problem.
Hron also shared data showing that King Elementary’s rate of students with attendance records of 90 percent enrollment time or more had improved from below 50 percent to 63 percent between 2022 and 2023.
Chronic absenteeism has also been a difficult issue at Gibsonton Elementary, Gilmore told me. But here again, she credited the community schools approach for helping the school significantly improve its numbers.
“There are multiple causes of chronic absenteeism including mental health problems, homelessness, job loss in the family, and disability issues,” she said. “It’s impossible for schools to address all of these at once because they don’t have the resources, so we’re focusing on one family at a time.”
The most recent data Gilmore was able to share supported her claims. During the 2021-2022 school year, nearly 57 percent of chronically absent Gibsonton Elementary students improved their daily attendance, and 351 students had greater than 90 percent attendance. Those measures improved further during the 2022-2023 school year, when just over 63 percent of chronically absent students improved their daily attendance, and 408 students had greater than 90 percent attendance.
“To address absenteeism or any other important problem you need to think outside the box because human beings are complex,” Gilmore said, and the community schools approach seems to help schools do that.