Students throughout the region are back from summer break, and at Pajaro Valley Unified School District, additional services are coming. Earlier this year, the district received the third-largest grant — $32.8 million — in a statewide program aimed at converting conventional K-12 schools into community schools.
There’s no universal definition of what exactly a community school is, but they are often referred to as hubs where students and families can access services beyond education — like food pantries, laundry rooms, health clinics, and mental health counselors. Community schools also rely heavily on partnerships with local child care organizations and programs that bolster social-emotional learning.
Even before the grant, seven PVUSD schools had been gradually adopting community schools practices. Rolling Hills Middle School in Watsonville is one of them. The school recently finished building a new wellness center, which is made up of one main room roughly the size of a large classroom, with smaller offices attached.
“One of the biggest components of our wellness center is the fact that we needed to make sure that it was accessible to other services,” said Selene Muñoz, the principal of Rolling Hills.
The wellness center is home to offices for the nurse, psychologist, and multiple counselors. Now, it’s also home to the community school specialist’s office. Colorful posters written in English and Spanish adorn the walls, and there are several couches and tables spread throughout. It’s a place for students to hang out, but it’s also where they can go for support.
Just across a small courtyard, there’s a food pantry that will soon have laundry services, according to Muñoz. Walking around the campus in late July, many of the spaces and services were clearly works in progress. But that they’re coming is, in large part, thanks to the community schools grant.
“The vision is that we're creating schools that are real community hubs,” said PVUSD Superintendent Heather Contreras. “We look at, how do we reach all aspects of the child, not just the educational math and English, but how are we also helping them to have their social-emotional needs met, their artistic and creative needs met? And how do we bring their parents along with us in those endeavors?”
Contreras hopes this new influx of funding from the state, which will be spread out over the next five years, will be enough to establish a solid foundation for all 35 schools in the district.
“Where we want to be in 2030 is that this is just our way of being, that we as schools work to service the whole child, the whole family, the whole community,” Contreras said.
At that point, she hopes the community schools framework will be embedded into the operations of all of the district’s campuses. But getting there will take a lot of work, and the schools can’t do it alone.
Kendra Fehrer, founder of Bay Area-based Heartwise Learning, has worked in the community schools space for 15 years. She was brought on as a consultant while PVUSD developed their grant proposal. One of the keys to making a community school sustainable beyond the lifecycle of any particular grant, she said, is building strong partnerships with community organizations — like groups who run after school programs, local youth centers, and health clinics. She said it’s important that schools and community groups have a shared interest in building partnerships into their budgets.
“So you're not just paying someone to give you this service for the next five years, but you're actually building a relationship where you're in it together and you have a common goal of serving students,” Fehrer said.
For Muñoz, at Rolling Hills, the goal of all of these services and partnerships is not only to prepare students for life after graduation, but to empower them while they are still in school. Sometimes that can be as simple as making sure they know what services and supports are available.
“Because we have been working on this for a couple years now, we have more students who are aware about social and mental well-being. So they can access our counselors,” Muñoz said. “The idea is to make sure that when they come here…they know how to access those services so that they can advocate for themselves.”
Muñoz and her team at Rolling Hills have made a lot of progress, but there’s a lot left to do. She wants families to remember that the wellness center and other services didn’t pop up overnight.
“A lot of the things that you have seen, it has taken over three years to establish,” she said. “We just received the grant in May. And so I think people need to understand that it's going to take some time for us to truly…be successful.”
