A piece of legislation passed in 2021 and an outside-the-box research partnership between ̽̽ researchers and the Vermont Agency of Education could change the narrative of what school are and what we want them to be in Vermont.
Act 67, known as the Vermont Community Schools Act, gets down to the nitty-gritty work of re-envisioning schools as resource hubs designed to provide coordinated supports and services that help students and families with increasingly complex needs.
With the passage of the act came $3.4 million in federal funds from the American Rescue Plan Act earmarked for community school grants. The Vermont Agency of Education developed a competitive three-year pilot program and used these funds to award grants to five participating school districts throughout the state, with the funding focused on underserved schools and communities.
“Act 67 not only provided a competitive grant opportunity, but it also described a framework of how to meet the holistic needs of students, families and communities,” said Bernice Garnett, associate professor of education who heads Project CORE (Community-based Participatory Research and Restorative Practices in Education).
The act also laid the foundation for rural, underperforming schools to build a community school along the lines of the five community school pillars: integrated student supports; expanded and enriched learning time and opportunities; active family and community engagement; collaborative leadership and practices; and safe, inclusive, and equitable learning environments.
Five school districts were awarded pilot grants: Vergennes Elementary School in Addison Northwest Supervisory District, The Cabot School in the Caledonia Central Supervisory Union, the North Country Supervisory Union, Hazen Union High School in the Orleans Southwest Supervisory Union, and the White River Valley middle School in the White River Valley Supervisory Union. In total the five schools support 3,560 PreK-12 students, their families and their communities.
The Community Schools Research-Practice-Partnership (RPP)
As part of the grant application, each district identified high-priority issues for their schools and how they would apply the funds. For the past three years, the Agency of Education and Project CORE ̽̽ partners have been working closely with the pilot schools so awardees have data they can use to refine their programming and inform future state CS legislation.
CORE is an interdisciplinary research team of five CESS faculty dedicated to community engaged research to support educational and health equity in local communities. CORE plays the key role of leveraging ̽̽’s research expertise to guide educators in all five districts to implement programming that builds on local strengths and meets local needs.
It is part of what Garnett explains is a research practice partnership, a long-term collaboration aimed at educational improvement through engagement with research.
“This way, we’re not waiting until the end of the three years to evaluate,” she explains. “It’s giving educators real-time data to inform practice and make adjustments as they go along.”
In partnership with Vermont Agency of Education partners, CORE team members conduct site visits and support monthly community school cohort meetings with the Act 67 awardees to troubleshoot and problem-solve with school partners throughout the year.
Jess DeCarolis is the director of student pathways at the Vermont Agency of Education and the principal collaborator with CORE. She led the effort to translate Act 67 into requests for proposal documents for Vermont school districts. It was an especially heavy lift because the timing of issuing RFPs in 2021 coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic. She regards the CORE/state partnership as unique.
“There is always a tension between mandated reforms for schools and the lack of funding to support them. This relationship with ̽̽ fills in some of those resource gaps by providing hands-on attention to schools as they set goals and progress through the three-year pilot.”
DeCarolis also believes collaboration with ̽̽ humanizes a state agency that can often be seen as faceless and inaccessible.
“Obviously we are a bureaucracy, though I’ve been floating for several years the idea of our agency as a ‘human-ocracy’—putting the human back into the equation,” she says.
While each of the five community schools are built around the five pillars, each one is different—the design is based on the unique needs and resources of each particular region. All of the participants are using some of the funds to hire community school coordinators charged with connecting administrators, teachers, students, families and community members.
The Cabot School envisions afterschool, leadership and internship opportunities. The coordinator in the North Country Supervisory Union will respond to urgent student requests to provide emergency food, clothing, and hygiene items for students in need. Likewise, Vergennes Union Elementary School will address food insecurity while forwarding existing literacy programs.
“The takeaway is that this type of intensive partnership between government and higher education institutions rarely happens,” notes Garnett. “We’re a small state and there are intrinsic connections between school and community. By building on those connections locally, we think we can make a big impact.”