If a child has to squint to see the blackboard, she may have trouble learning the multiplication tables. If she is often absent to stay home and babysit her brother, her understanding of history will be patchy. If her mother is a drug addict, diagramming sentences isn’t going to be a priority. This is the sort of logic that has led to a nationwide push for what are often called community schools. Schools that serve as full-service community centers engineered to address a wide range of so-called “barriers to education”—from family unemployment to parent illiteracy to medical complications—do a better job of educating children, advocates say.

It’s not a new idea: John Dewey talked of “school as a social center” a century ago, and New York City’s Children’s Aid Society opened the first of its much-lauded community schools in 1992. But the idea has lately been on the lips of powerful people. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has said, “Every school should be a community school.” In a 2009 interview on Charlie Rose, Duncan said schools should be open “12, 13, 14 hours a day” six or seven days a week with a “wide variety of after-school activities: drama, arts, sports, chess, debate, academic enrichment, programs for parents, GED, ESL, family literacy nights, pot luck dinners.” Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and Randi Weingarten, the influential head of the American Federation of Teachers, were both featured speakers at this year’s National Community Schools Forum, attended by more than 1,000 people. And federal education grants, such as the new Promise Neighborhoods initiative and the Full Service Community Schools Program, increasingly fund efforts that mirror those of community schools.

One wouldn’t know it now, but Baltimore embraced the community schools strategy years ago. (If you want to raise the hackles of an advocate, refer to community schools as a “project” or a “program.” Proponents like to emphasize that community schools are a whole new way of looking at the function of school, not simply a new component tacked on to an existing structure.) In 2000, a group of volunteers formed the Baltimore Coalition for Community Schools and took to lobbying city administrators, nonprofits, and other local power brokers. Interest gradually built, and in 2003, advocates created Baltimore Community School Connections (BCSC), an organization that provided technical assistance to developing community schools. By 2005, Baltimore was sending a delegation of 40 people—including then-City Council President Sheila Dixon—to the national community schools conference in Chicago. That same year, then-Mayor Martin O’Malley created the first official community schools in Baltimore. There were 46 of them, at least on paper.

In most other cities, community schools had emerged slowly, school by school. But Baltimore decided to go for broke and create many community schools at once, primarily by transforming existing schools that already had some outside partnerships. Partly as a result, the city was briefly in the national spotlight. “Everybody came to Baltimore because we were like trailblazers,” says Jessica Strauss, one of the chief catalysts behind the coalition and the community schools movement in Baltimore. “We were considered national leaders in this work,” agrees Lisa Bleich, who worked for BCSC for three years, starting in 2005. “We were asked to give Community Schools 101.”

Now, 10 years after the formation of the coalition, Baltimore’s pioneering community schools initiative is, by many estimates, nearly deflated. The BCSC is defunct and city funding for the initiative has dropped substantially since the early years. Only 20 schools in the city are officially community schools, and early champions of the effort say that few of these truly fit the model. Many community school coordinators—the on-site air-traffic controllers who make sure the services in a community school mesh and address student needs—agree that the initiative has not lived up to the dream. Even as the term is becoming a buzzword in education circles, some supporters fear that the community schools movement in Baltimore may have outlived its glory days.

This decline is disheartening, proponents say, because the model works. Community school advocates tend to speak a particularly deadly dialect of jargon. What with all the “stakeholders” “coming to the table” to “facilitate discussion” on “standard deliverables,” one might conclude that the concept is just so much bureaucratic gibberish. But several of the city’s remaining community schools show the model’s promise. In his first gubernatorial debate with former governor Robert Ehrlich, Gov. O’Malley singled out a Baltimore community school—Patterson Park Public Charter—as a place “where kids are making progress.” And though little research has been conducted on the effectiveness of Baltimore’s community schools, district surveys show more parental involvement when compared with other city schools.

Wolfe Street Academy, a Fells Point elementary school that became a community school in 2006, is a case in point. Daily morning meetings in the school cafeteria are packed with parents, most chatting in Spanish. (The student body is about 67 percent Hispanic.) “At any given meeting or assembly, we’ll easily show 50 to 60 families, which is about half our population,” Principal Mark Gaither says. “I think a lot of that comes from the sense that we’re trying to meet them halfway.”

Edith, a shy young parent who did not want to give her last name, concurs. “I like this school because there are a lot of programs, like English classes for adults,” she says in Spanish.

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