Focus Areas
Full-Service Community Schools
Full-service community schools are partnerships between schools and their communities that provide comprehensive support to students and families. This strategy transforms schools into neighborhood hubs that offer wraparound services, extended learning opportunities, and family engagement programming—all designed to eliminate barriers to learning and support student success. By co-locating supports and fostering authentic partnerships, community schools create a cradle-to-career continuum of services that address the whole child and strengthen entire communities.
The Full-Service Community Schools (FSCS) program is a program of the US Department of Education that offers grants to support the planning, implementation, and operation of community schools. Metis Associates has been partnering with FSCS grantees since 2018. Our grant writing experts have helped local educational agencies and nonprofits secure these multi-year federal grants, and our program evaluation experts help organizations strengthen implementation and support continuous improvement, satisfy reporting requirements, and set the stage for program sustainability.
Our Full-Service Community School Services
Our continuum of services helps you navigate the requirements for FSCS and other competitive community school grants, guides you through every step of your proposal, and helps you secure funding to achieve your vision for student and family success.
Grant writing
We stay up-to-the minute on best practices for FSCS and other community school-related funding sources. We support the collaborative process of designing and producing compelling FSCS and other grant applications that are highly responsive to local needs and contexts.
Program evaluation
We design evaluations that measure implementation fidelity, track your service delivery, assess outcomes against performance indicators, and support all reporting requirements. Beyond compliance, we partner with principals, community school coordinators, and stakeholders to make evaluation data accessible and actionable for program improvement.
Impact Evaluation
We work with you to identify priority interventions within your community schools model and design rigorous impact studies that capture both short-term outcomes and longer-term effects. Our mixed-methods approaches demonstrate how integrated supports, expanded learning, family engagement, and collaborative leadership are making a difference—yielding evidence of effectiveness.
Our Full-Service Community School Expertise
Our expertise includes:
- Fidelity of implementation assessment
- Cradle-to-career continuum development
- Qualitative and quantitative data collection and analysis
- Logic model and theory of change development
- Multilingual survey research
- Dashboard development with views for stakeholders
- Analyzing student achievement data
- Rigorous impact studies
- Performance measurement to meet federal FSCS reporting requirements
- Stakeholder engagement in the evaluation process
- Data-related training for the community school community
- Interactive data presentations
Organizations We Work With
Metis is proud to work with school districts and nonprofits across the country to create full-service community schools that improve the coordination, integration, accessibility, and effectiveness of services for children and families.
What Our Full-Service Community School Clients Say
Metis Associates has been an invaluable program evaluator and partner with Paterson Public Schools for our 21st Century Community Learning Center and Full Service Community Schools grants.
Kristy M. Wellins
Associate Project Director of Full Service Community Schools Paterson Public Schools
Over the past 10 years, Metis’s grant writing team has worked with us to raise over $4M in funding for our schools from city, state and federal sources, including from the US Department of Education’s Full-Service Community Schools grant program. Metis has created effective and impactful parent and teacher surveys to help us leverage the voices of our school communities. These studies and surveys have generated easy-to-read reports that we have been able to share with both internal and external stakeholders.
Christine M. Schuch
Associate Executive Director United Community Schools and United Federation of Teachers
Ready to make an impact?
Learn how we can support your FSCS efforts.
Our Approach to Full-Service Community School Consulting
Readiness Assessment
We conduct a comprehensive readiness assessment to determine if your district or organization is positioned to successfully apply for community school funding. We analyze data at the community, district, and school levels to inform strategic planning and identify opportunities for partnership and resource coordination.
Planning
We provide thought partnership throughout the entire planning process, from designing your program model aligned with community school principles and best practices to developing logic models, identifying appropriate partners, and establishing meaningful performance measures that demonstrate impact and meet funder requirements.
Grant writing
We offer comprehensive grant-writing services for community school funding opportunities—whether federal, state, local, or philanthropic. We can manage the entire application process or provide targeted technical assistance, including intensive coaching, review, editing, and strategic support.
Program Evaluation
We also offer the opportunity to continue working with us in an evaluation capacity. Our evaluators and researchers bring deep expertise in community school evaluation, continuous improvement processes, and meeting diverse reporting requirements while capturing the strong impact of your work.
Why Partner With Metis Associates
Demonstrated track record
We have partnered successfully with school districts and nonprofit organizations across the country to secure community school funding and build sustainable initiatives. Our clients span New York State (NYC and Albany), New Jersey (Paterson and Passaic), Washington State (Vancouver), Nevada (Las Vegas, Humboldt, and Elko), and beyond, working across federal, state, and local funding streams.
Partnership experts
Community schools are fundamentally about building authentic, equitable partnerships. Our consultant team engages all stakeholders—including district and school leaders, nonprofit organizations, families, students, and community members—to co-create strategies that reflect local needs and assets.
Performance measurement
We help you measure program performance in ways that promote continuous improvement, while meeting funder requirements. We apply community school evaluation best practices, from implementation fidelity assessments to rigorous impact studies, to capture how your work is transforming outcomes for students, families, and communities.
Our Full-Service Community Schools Consultants
Donna Wilkens
With more than 25 years of grant writing and program evaluation experience, Donna serves as a Managing Senior Associate and Portfolio Director at Metis Associates, specializing in community schools, youth development, and family- and community-strengthening initiatives. She has led evaluations for community schools across multiple states and funding streams, partnering with school districts, youth-serving agencies, and communities to design and implement participatory evaluation approaches. Her expertise includes developing comprehensive support strategies, conducting implementation fidelity assessments, designing mixed-methods studies including school case studies and stakeholder surveys, overseeing rigorous impact evaluations, and building organizational capacity for data use and sustainability. Donna is known for her collaborative approach, bringing together diverse stakeholders to inform evaluation design and use data for continuous improvement.
Sharon Baskind-Wing
Sharon has more than 10 years of professional experience in grant writing and program evaluation, primarily in education and human services. She develops proposals for federal, state, and local funding opportunities, including comprehensive evaluation plans and performance measures for community schools initiatives, out-of-school-time initiatives, and other youth development programs. She currently serves as lead evaluator on multiple community schools projects and is well-versed in data collection and reporting to meet diverse funder requirements. Sharon engages youth and families in the community school evaluation process and leads broad-based evaluation advisory groups to inform evaluation practices through authentic partnership. She’s a skilled presenter who uses data placemats and other engaging tools to make findings accessible and actionable for diverse audiences.
Service your program from vision to results with seasoned consultants who know community schools inside and out.
Our Full-Service Community School Consulting Case Studies
United Community Schools (UCS) is a “teacher-inspired” non-profit operated by the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) that promotes a six-pillar community school model through consulting, local and national advocacy, and the operation of over 30 community schools in New York City and Albany, New York.
By helping CISN secure federal FSCS funding and document effective practices across the diversity of Nevada, Metis has contributed to an initiative that serves as a national model for multi-district community school implementation.
Case Study: Bridging Rural and Urban Communities Through Strategic Evaluation
Frequently Asked Questions: Full-Service Community Schools
Community schools are a proven strategy that transforms schools into neighborhood hubs by coordinating wraparound supports, expanded learning opportunities, family engagement, and community partnerships. They’re designed to eliminate barriers to learning and support the whole child by bringing together resources from schools, families, community organizations, and public agencies.
While community schools take different forms based on local needs, most successful models include four core pillars:
- Integrated Student Supports – Coordinated services that address students’ academic, health, mental health, and social needs
- Expanded and Enriched Learning Time and Opportunities – Before-school, after-school, summer, and enrichment programming
- Active Family and Community Engagement – Authentic partnerships that honor families as leaders and decision-makers
Collaborative Leadership and Practices – Shared decision-making structures and a community school coordinator role
Community schools access diverse funding streams, including federal grants (like the Full-Service Community Schools program), state initiatives, local education agency budgets, foundation grants, and partnerships that leverage existing community resources. Many successful community schools braid multiple funding sources to create sustainable initiatives.
School districts, individual schools, nonprofit organizations, community-based organizations, and institutions of higher education can all lead community schools initiatives. Success depends on strong partnerships rather than any single organizational structure.
Talk to us about your Full-Service Community Schools needs
Get in touch with us to learn more about our services and how we can best help you achieve your mission.