This article is part of the Under the Lens series
Street Blocks to Alphabet Blocks: The Housing-Education Connection
In 2013, after a three-year campaign led by community advocates, the state of Maryland authorized the Maryland Stadium Authority (MSA) to issue $60 million in bonds to support the renovation and/or replacement of Baltimore City public schools, leveraging $1.1 billion in total. Interestingly, the state legislation called on leaders to go beyond the school day and:
“Design schools that allow for recreational opportunities for the community, combined with other cooperative uses and school partnership programs . . . [and] be . . . champions for education, economic development and neighborhood revitalization in the City of Baltimore.”
The resulting 21st Century School Buildings Program (21CSBP) is an unprecedented state and local investment in Baltimore schools and requires collaboration among its four main partners; Baltimore City Public School System (BCPSS), Maryland Stadium Authority, City of Baltimore, and the state’s Interagency Commission on Public School Construction. This ambitious effort takes place in the context of a robust community schools effort, where the district supports all schools to offer wrap-around services, such as food pantries, mental and physical health services, and recreation activities, to name a few.
The 21CSBP also catalyzed the philanthropic community to align their funding interests and actions around schools and neighborhoods. Launched in 2015, the School Centered Neighborhood Investment Initiative (SCNII) has worked in collaboration with the Baltimore City Department of Planning, its Department of Housing and Community Development, its Department of Recreation and Parks, Baltimore Development Corporation, the mayor’s office, BCPSS, and the Family League of Baltimore. SCNII’s goal was to spur neighborhood revitalization within communities that were planning for new or renovated school buildings, positioning schools as centers of the community and as anchors for leveraging larger physical development. SCNII saw its non-governmental dollars as contributing to the ultimate goals of new and renovated school buildings in strengthened communities with increased homeownership and new real estate and business investment. (While SCNII still exists, the COVID pandemic did shift attention of its members to other priorities.)
Since the legislation passed, 27 schools have been built or renovated and opened, with the final two under construction; when they are completed, the 21CSBP will officially end. Across the city, students are learning in new and innovative buildings, communities have new community spaces to enjoy, and neighborhoods have experienced tens of millions of dollars in public capital improvements and millions of dollars of programmatic investments from philanthropy and the nonprofit sector.
Connecting school building investment to community development requires work at the neighborhood level and across city-level entities, as well. As the 21CSBP closes out, here are four lessons about how school building investments can support community development goals, and vice versa.
1—Differing underlying philosophies of community development and schools create friction during implementation and take time to iron out.
The coordination between BCPSS, MSA, and city agencies was key to setting the framework, establishing funding streams, and ensuring desired outcomes for 21CSBP. While all those entities believed in the overall importance of school building investment, their underlying philosophies differed—implicitly and explicitly—which shaped decision-making and outcomes.
The MSA, the financing and construction management arm of the 21st Century School Buildings Program, operated from a commitment to cost-effectiveness. With no expertise in school facilities specifically, but with a keen awareness of cost increases from any project delays, it focused on delivering projects on time and at or under budget. It paid less attention to and put less intention toward public engagement or the big visionary outcomes asserted by the enabling legislation.
The school district’s mission focused its staff on building new schools that best served their students’ needs. Their priority was to direct 21CSBP investments to school sites that had been the most historically deprived. They wanted to deliver new schools and improved resources to these communities first, thus meeting the school system’s stated commitment to racial justice and equitable education.
City agencies understood new and renovated schools as key pieces of neighborhood infrastructure that would provide benefits to residents and help stabilize and vitalize neighborhoods. The departments of Planning and Recreation and Parks prioritized local resident and community use of new and renovated schools. They assumed that these schools would be designed to fit into already existing neighborhood plans to ensure seamless integration.
Department of Housing and Community Development staff believed new or renovated schools would be best sited in neighborhoods where economic and social opportunity was emergent or existed, but under threat. New school investments could then work with market forces and other public subsidy in housing and retail development to support neighborhood stability and growth, and, by extension, residents’ social and economic mobility.
One way these differing philosophies came into tension was in decisions around siting. For example, the Baltimore City Public School System, which got to make the decisions around which sites were included, prioritized Southwest Baltimore, a community that has experienced multigenerational harm through disinvestment and deprivation as a result of both city and education policies. For school system leadership, siting a 21CSBP school in this neighborhood would mean providing new and improved facilities to one of the system’s highest need communities. After generations of neglect and deprivation, the district believed, this community should be first in line for these new resources.
Housing and community development professionals, however, questioned the wisdom of directing upward of $35 million into this neighborhood. They want the investments they make to be coordinated with schools to achieve larger positive effects throughout the neighborhood, and they didn’t think that seemed likely in Southwest Baltimore, which continues to face very high poverty rates and significant economic need. Its housing market is among the weakest in the city. Unfortunately, one city staffer commented, a new elementary school “on its own, wouldn’t make a community impact. There’s no reason to think it would.” These community development practitioners must manage competing mandates to support neighborhood development. For example, newer state stipulations for the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program make applications in distressed neighborhood less competitive, which results in fewer public dollars to help subsidize construction and renovation in places like Southwest Baltimore.
Here, this staff is defining “community impact” in economic terms, rather than educational or social terms. This reflects an overarching community development strategy that focuses on neighborhoods that have needs but are close to or already stable; places where the investments under discussion would be enough to catalyze a tipping point or “win” for all residents and local businesses.
For BCPSS, however, “community impact” and the promise of that multimillion dollar investment was about repairing past harm and setting a better future for young people and families in the neighborhood.
In the end, it was the school system that drove 21CSBP school siting decisions. Community development decisions continued based on the philosophy, priorities, and resource constraints that those staffers faced. And today, the cross-sector agencies have reached an equilibrium and a rhythm that allows them to work together despite competing priorities. These tensions raise questions about both potential missed opportunities for using school buildings as strategic investments and also how to support more reparative and less economically driven community development practice.
2—A high-capacity community-based organization can anchor connections between school and neighborhood.
In Baltimore, 21CSBP schools are also community schools. The community schools model is an evidence-based, school improvement approach that links schools and surrounding community organizations to provide social and health care services, after school programming, and other resources for parents and even other residents as well as students, in the school building. Each community school has a dedicated community school coordinator who manages partnerships, programming, and family engagement between the school site and partner organizations.
In Baltimore, some community school coordinators are employees of the school district and others are employees of outside nonprofit organizations. They all work inside of schools with principals and other staff, ensuring that families’ needs are met and that partnerships align with in-school priorities.
In Southwest Baltimore’s neighborhoods, local community organizations did not have significant capacity, lacking funding and full-time staff. Their community school coordinator was a school district employee who worked mostly with school leadership and focused on bringing outside partnerships into the school to provide wraparound services to students and families. This inward facing stance (along with the neighborhood conditions described above) meant that the school leaders forged few connections around housing, financial literacy, and needs of community members who were not affiliated with the school.
Yet a different configuration of staff and resources can improve interconnections. For example, Southeast Baltimore is a collection of more than 20 neighborhoods, home to a diversity of racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic demographics. Housing market conditions are considered relatively stable compared to other parts of the city. The Southeast Community Development Corporation (SECDC) is a long-standing community-based organization that employs the community school coordinators for area schools.
Schools are central to SECDC’s work; it views schools as “the hubs and hearts” of the neighborhood, and its work in schools is grounded in reciprocity. SECDC sees its role as not only helping to improve school-centered outcomes, such as increased attendance, but also connecting families to other neighborhood and community development activities. According to one SECDC staffer, this work emerged from a growing desire to engage residents beyond those who usually participate in neighborhood association meetings.
Working with families in schools has helped SECDC organize parents to support improvements in their neighborhood. At Highlandtown Elementary/Middle School, for example, the community school coordinator formed a parent leadership group that has advocated for beautification and greening projects around the school. As parents strengthen their efforts and take on leadership roles within schools, SECDC is also looking for strategies to engage families in neighborhood-based committees.
SECDC also connects its other efforts and contributes know-how to the community schools work. It provides financial assistance for families at risk of losing housing or having utilities shut off through its Family Stability Program. Finally, it uses the 21CSBP renovations as a part of its strategy to market the neighborhoods to developers for other housing and commercial investments; it understands how to talk about leveraging the public investment in schools into private investments in other neighborhood stabilization efforts.
Research shows that community school coordinators are key to supporting students in school and are critical conduits that connect families to non-education resources in housing, mental health, and transportation, among other needs. As Baltimore demonstrates, coordinators may be better positioned with the capacity and know-how to do this effectively when they are part of larger community-based organizations and community development corporations.
3—School stability requires there to be a comprehensive housing strategy that focuses on new development that won’t displace existing residents.
While schools can stabilize families in neighborhoods, stable housing is also critical to the success of schools. Without a consistent school-aged population, the math of operating a school building does not work, a challenge that Baltimore’s Cherry Hill neighborhood is facing.
In the 1940s, Cherry Hill became a site for segregated public housing developments for the growing population of Black residents in the city. Today, Black residents still make up the largest share of residents, though there have been small increases in the proportions of white, Asian, and Hispanic/Latine residents. Along with its history of racial isolation, Cherry Hill is an area of concentrated poverty. Its school demographics mirror the demographics of the broader community. The public housing authority remains the largest landowner in the neighborhood, which shapes the housing market conditions. Also influential are newer developments adjacent to Cherry Hill, including the Port Covington waterfront development, which bring possibilities for community benefits, yet also the threat of gentrification-induced displacement.
Historically, the Cherry Hill Development Corporation has been an important anchor institution, working to mitigate displacement pressures. It serves as a community land trust, works to renovate and sell homes to Cherry Hill residents, and provides homebuying education programs. More recently, Cherry Hill Strong formed with the support of Purpose Built Communities. This new nonprofit organization is working to “quarterback” collaboration and meaningful engagement with residents on housing, education, and other community goals.
The Cherry Hill neighborhood has two 21CSBP schools. Although the schools had seen small increases in enrollment, they were still operating at just over half of their building capacity. The state’s school facilities guidance defines an appropriate space-utilization ratio for elementary schools as at least 95 percent during normal operating hours. Based on enrollment numbers and projections, it is unlikely that Cherry Hill would have qualified for renovations of those two schools under standard state-level procedures for awarding school facilities funding. The 21st Century School Buildings Program did not have to follow those procedures.
Some state leaders question the fiscal sustainability of operating two new school buildings, given Cherry Hill’s size and demographic trends. Philanthropic and nonprofit leaders push back on this concern, citing the deep history of racially discriminatory, systemic disinvestment in schools and neighborhoods that serve majority Black and Brown communities like Cherry Hill. One remedy to these harms, they argue, is to pour more—not less—investment into these communities.
And it may be a solid long-term community development strategy as well: the 21CSBP schools were huge selling points that helped bring the national Purpose Built Communities network to Cherry Hill. And now, those efforts may bring housing strategies that can support existing residents and also increase and stabilize the population, which in turn would stabilize the school.
Cherry Hill’s story demonstrates how sufficient school operation and maintenance funding is predicated on assumptions about population stability and growth, which require solid housing strategies.
4—Public acknowledgment of historic harms and tangible changes in the neighborhood are key to rebuilding trust with residents.
In Baltimore, families and neighborhood residents understand that the conditions of the built environment—from vacant lots to closed recreation centers to deteriorated school buildings—are the result of generations of disinvestment from public-sector actors. Communities have demonstrated resilience and self-determination despite these actions, and their trust in public agencies remains deeply damaged. Practitioners must be mindful of this history when planning, and make immediate visible changes to rebuild trust.
As described earlier, in Southwest Baltimore, the new 21CSBP elementary school represented BCPSS’s commitment to stemming the tide of disinvestment and serving a community historically neglected. For some, the elementary school’s renovation was a signal that the school system’s commitment was not just to areas of interest to private developers, but to communities across the city, and this made them optimistic.
However, the expansion of the school was coupled with the closure of another. The closure and merger process proved difficult for the community. Community members kept fighting to keep their school open even after the decision to close was finalized. Families felt betrayed and lost trust in the community association, the school system, and the city at large.
In the aftermath of the closure process, school-level partners and the school district worked to create a unified school identity across the two schools that would be consolidated in the new building. These efforts were slow to bear fruit because families were mistrustful. While the staff of the new school were not necessarily involved with the closure and did not act intentionally to damage trust with families, the new school nonetheless carried the legacy of the negative impacts of the closure process.
Trust-building can be slow, but tangible change can help. Baltimore’s INSPIRE (Investing in Neighborhoods and Schools to Promote Improvement, Revitalization, and Excellence) program aims to align school and neighborhood planning and development. Facilitated by the city’s planning department and carried out through city agencies and community partners, INSPIRE has helped transform neighborhoods immediately surrounding the 21CSBP schools in visible ways. Its local projects include creating and improving pocket parks, community gardens, sidewalks, street trees, murals, and lighting. These projects reflect careful engagement with local communities and the top priorities of their residents.
In many neighborhoods across the city, these projects engage community residents and build trust through a collaborative design and planning process. The fact that projects are implemented in short time frames is crucial to demonstrating public agencies’ renewed commitment to these long-neglected communities. In the longer term, INSPIRE neighborhood plans could serve as guiding documents for more extensive alignment of budget priorities in housing, transportation, recreation and parks, and school facilities. While 21CSBP is sunsetting, INSPIRE will complete nine plans, continue to implement projects across the city, and maintain ongoing communication and collaboration with partner city agencies and Baltimore City Public School System.
Baltimore’s 21st Century School Buildings Program offers a compelling example for how to treat schools as if they were central to community development. While there are challenges in working across sectors, the individual, social, physical, and economic impacts can be tremendous when schools are at the center of community development.
NOTE: This article is based on findings from a research project conducted from 2018 to 2020 with Dr. Alisha Butler and Erin O’Keefe, funded by the Maryland Philanthropy Network. More details on 21CSBP and school-centered community development are available in this report (PDF), and in the book Community Development and Schools.
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Apparently no one cared enough to ask teachers and others about their housing aspirations and how achieving those aspirations would impact attracting and retaining the staff that the kids need. Work could be done for next to nothing.