Community Schools + Linked Learning in Secondary School Redesign

County offices of education are uniquely positioned to change that. By convening educators, students, families, employers, higher education partners, and community organizers, they can help districts move beyond disparate program implementation toward a shared vision for secondary school redesign. In collaboration with trusted partners, the Alliance supports county offices in convening and facilitating regional secondary school redesign networks. These networks help districts, schools, and community partners create more coherent, community-responsive, and future-oriented systems of opportunity for young people.

In particular, this service builds on the complementary strengths of community schools and Linked Learning. When paired, these approaches have produced secondary schools that are both deeply connected to local communities and intentionally structured to prepare young people for future success. Together, they also integrate many of the features statewide investments require.

This service is well suited for county offices seeking to:

• Align community schools, Golden State Pathways, dual enrollment, and student support investments into a coherent redesign strategy
• Support student belonging, engagement, and future readiness through integrated pathways, supports, and postsecondary opportunity
• Develop regional examples that inform future policy and practice
• Create implementation plans for participating schools and districts

This service helps communities bring together student support, community partnership, college and career pathways, and postsecondary opportunities into a shared vision for the future of secondary education. Through the Alliance’s community-centered design process, participants learn from promising practices, co-design new approaches, and develop the stewardship structures needed to sustain improvement over time.

Empathy-centered inquiry and community engagement

Participating teams begin by interviewing one another, and then reaching beyond their group to engage other students, families, educators, and community members, ensuring that they hear from all corners of their community, including students and families having both positive and negative experiences with the school system. This builds a shared understanding of current experiences, local aspirations, and implementation realities. Teams synthesize these findings and create asset and opportunity maps that compare their current context to the standards for high quality community schools and Linked Learning pathways.

Learning and discovery

Teams engage in a structured period of learning that includes site visits to exemplary community schools and Linked Learning pathways, research, additional interviews, and analysis of promising practices. This phase helps participants broaden their understanding of what’s possible and ensures that students, families, educators, and community partners enter the design process as informed contributors. Teams identify program, structure, practice, and school culture priorities that address the standards and incorporate insights and inspiration gathered during the learning and discovery phase.

Collaborative design and prototype testing

Building on shared inquiry and learning, teams engage in design workshops to develop prototype school designs that weave together the structures, practices, and tenets of school culture they identified in the learning and discovery phase. They then share these prototype designs with people from across the community to test whether their design feels responsive to the hopes and needs of a range of community members. Teams use the feedback they receive to refine their approach and produce a complete school redesign concept.

Implementation planning and continuous improvement

The process culminates in the development of concrete plans, stewardship mechanisms, and learning systems that help schools and districts sustain redesign efforts over time. Teams produce implementation plans that map out the design, launch and support of each component of their design. Teams also create and begin to use community accountability and stewardship structures that will support ongoing shared ownership and improvement.