Stewarding planning with community schools

This report makes the case that the planning profession should stop overlooking and siloing planning for K-12 schools. Schools impact planners’ work. APA members have been trying to end the siloed approach to school planning for some time. A review of school planning matters shows that the best that schools can do to support their own communities isn’t enough to address a deep rooted planning problem: Fragmented governance of metropolitan areas continues to leave youth in concentrated poverty. Only an un-“fragmented” planning can reintegrate neighborhoods, and thus schools. Planners should leverage community schools to facilitate an education element in comprehensive plans aimed at reintegrating communities at a regional level. Community schools can serve as a physical hub, an educational strategy, and a placemaking approach, and are more prepared than traditional schools to engage in comprehensive planning. This report develops a diagnostic tool, the School Plan Integration Report Card, to explore opportunities for cooperation between a comprehensive planning entity and the community schools in its area. It establishes standard grading criteria meant to provoke consideration of how the goals, objectives, and policies of a community school plan and comprehensive planning document(s) conflict or reinforce one another. To pilot this tool, the report explores grading the only three cases of overlap between federally-funded community schools and award-winning comprehensive plans by using AI to conduct content analysis of extensive planning documents.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Science in Community and Regional Planning

Level thesis:degree_level

Masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Community and Regional Planning

Grantor

The University of Texas at Austin

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• Sanchez, M. A.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Paterson, Robert G.

Committee member dc:contributor.committeemember

• Sciara, Gian Claudia

• Community schools
• Comprehensive planning
• Governance
• School planning

Language dc:language.iso

English

Identifier URI

https://doi.org/10.26153/tsw/63483

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:repositories.lib.utexas.edu:2152/136173