During research on public health and how it is tied to public education often brought me to the concept of full-service community schools, which send the message that a student can be exponentially more successful if their community and their well beings are adequately served.

In one peer reviewed article titled: “Community Schools: a Public Health Opportunity to Reverse Urban Cycles of Disadvantage,” authors Catherine Diamond and Nicholas Freudenberg bring up that often communities with underserved schools are struggling with issues of public health and safety too, because they lack access to needed resources. In their abstract they state, “Since community schools seek to have an impact on populations, not just the children enrolled, they provide an opportunity to improve community health”(923). Improving community health turns a cycle of disadvantage, which is fed by poor health and schooling, into a cycle of advantage. 

Diamond and Freudenberg also say that a community school must build trust, establish norms, and link community members and students to resources and networks. The say that health and education exist in a reciprocal relationship and are effected in similar ways by geographical and cultural neighborhoods. By combing health and education, the outcomes are more equitable and more positive than if we were just to attack one of these institutions.

Continuing with the positive outcomes of taking heath and education into account simultaneously, John H. Houser performed a study in an urban community schools to examine the relationship between students’ participation in extracurricular health, wellness, and identity based programs and their achievement in school. Achievement was measured by test scores, which is an insufficient measure of student success. But, there have been few studies that look at the effect of community schools on students success and well-being. Houser looked at levels of participation in community based programs and then looked at how participation predicted student achievement. This study showed that “school- and community-sponsored program participation were significant predictors of academic achievement”(324). The results are positive but, more studies need to be done. This was just one school and one (debatably inadequate) measure of student success.

One aspect of his study that did stick out, though, was that there were high percentages of participation in culturally relevant programs like Hispanic Town Hall Meeting and the Father and Son/Mother and Daughter programs, which work to strengthen cultural identity and encourage college preparedness for Hispanic middle school students. The high levels of participation in these programs shows how important it is for a student and their family’s mental health to feel represented and supported by their schools programs, community schools can offer this.

Diamond, Catherine and Freudenberg, Nicholas. (2016) “Community Schools: a Public Health Opportunity to Reverse Urban Cycles of Disadvantage.” Journal of Urban Health, 93(6), pp. 923-939. doi: 10.1007/s11524-016-0082-5.

Houser, John. (2014). “Community- and School-Sponsored Program Participation and Academic Achievement in a Full-Service Community School” Education and Urban Society 48(4) pp. 324-345, doi:10.1177/0013124514533792.