Community Schools are Scaling and Sustaining Innovative ELO practices

Blog Series - Innovations in 
Expanded Learning Opportunities: 
The Community Schools Strategy

The Coalition for Community Schools is launching a nine-week blog series on how community school initiatives are supporting and strengthening innovations in expanded learning opportunities (ELO).

Many schools and communities are increasingly feeling the need to pay more attention to the opportunity gap facing our students. While the inequitable distribution of school resources (e.g., teachers, funding) has been well documented, there are also great inequities in the opportunities available inside and outside of the conventional school day.

Most educators agree that a well-rounded learning experience for children, whether during or beyond the conventional school day, should include a high-quality school curriculum as well as enriching and engaging learning and developmental opportunities such as drama, music, robotics, athletics, homework support, service learning and project-based learning. However, too many children, especially our nation’s poorest, lack access to high-quality expanded learning opportunities that we know lead to better cognitive social, emotional, and developmental outcomes for students.

Community schools ensure that students receive the panoply of academic and developmental learning opportunities during and beyond the school day. Expanding learning opportunities is one of the key dimensions of a community school (learn about the other dimensions such as community engagement and health and social supports here. In a community school, school staff or contract providers collaborate with community partners to focus on more time and more opportunities to learn. Community schools, by focusing on collaboration, are ideal incubators for high-quality and locally-supported expanded learning opportunities. Community schools have the structures and systems in place to not only create innovative ELO practices, but also to scale and sustain these practices to create positive outcomes for students, families, and communities.

Community partnerships are central to expanded learning opportunities in community schools. Partners range from community based organizations, institutions of higher education, faith-based institutions, to recreation departments, and many more. Partners offer badly needed opportunities to avoid summer slide, deepen students’ interactions with the community, enable them to see career opportunities, help enhance the curriculum or provide an opportunity to reimagine the school schedule so teachers have more time to collaborate and plan.

While Coalition partners cover a range of such partnerships, a particular subset primarily focus on ELO, including the Afterschool Alliance, National Center for Time and Learning, National Summer Learning Association, National Institute on Out-of-School Time, Partnership for After School Education, The Expanded Learning and Afterschool Project, and The After-School Corporation (TASC). These organizations understand that school-community partnerships are essential to high-quality and sustained ELO.

So, what do we mean by expanded learning opportunities? When we began speaking with our ELO colleagues and community school practitioners about all the different types of ELO, we decided it would be helpful to frame the conversation around a comprehensive ELO typology. 

We define expanded learning opportunities as more time for academics and enrichment beyond the conventional school day (e.g. extended day, summer, after school, etc.) and learning and development experiences that enhance the school curriculum during the conventional school day (e.g., community-based learning, community problem solving, and linked learning).

Over the next nine weeks this blog series will highlight innovative ELO practices from the diverse communities listed below. Community school leaders and practitioners will share their thinking about ELO design, planning and decision making, alignment with the school curriculum, relationship between schools and partners, innovative and blended use of funding, and how their community school systems and structures support various innovative ELO practices. As the blogs will show, community schools and their partners are providing more opportunities across all the times students can be reached, including the conventional school day.  We hope this blog series will bring various elements of ELO strategies to life and offer solutions that are transferable across communities.

Join us and give us your feedback as you read through the blogs over the next few weeks. 

See Blog 1: Cincinnati is Open for Business during School Breaks

Here’s the schedule of blogs:

Types of ELO	Community School Initiative
ELO required for all students
Expanded school day	Boston, MA
Expanded school year	Vancouver, WA
ELO for some/all students that increases the number of school days
Expanded school week (e.g., weekends)	Hartford, CT
Intersessions	Tulsa, OK
School Breaks	Cincinnati, OH
Summer	Ogden, UT
ELO for some/all students that increases time beyond conventional school days
After school	New Haven, CT
Before school	Lehigh Valley, PA
ELO for some/all students during conventional school day
Expanded learning opportunities during the conventional school day	Philadelphia, PA

To learn more about community schools and ELO, visit www.communityschools.org/elo 

The Wallace Foundation, which has sponsored this blog series, offers a library of free resources on expanded learning at www.wallacefoundation.org

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