Community School Coordinator Job Description

A Community School Coordinator is the person who turns an ordinary public school into a community school, and then keeps it running as one. The coordinator works at one site, alongside the principal, and owns a single question: what is keeping these students from learning, and who outside the building can help fix it? The answer might be a dental van, a food pantry, a housing caseworker, an immigration attorney who holds office hours in the library, or an after-school program that keeps the building open until six. The coordinator finds those partners, gets them into the school and makes sure the students who need them actually get there.

Maryland has written the job into statute. Section 9.9-104 of the state's Education Article requires every community school to have an experienced and qualified coordinator, and it spells out the work: establishing the community school, assessing student needs for wraparound services, developing an implementation plan with stakeholders, and coordinating programs that address out-of-school barriers. The list of possible programs runs from tutoring and English language learner courses to parenting classes, college and career advising, food pantries, rental assistance and school-based behavioral and physical health services. The needs assessment has to be completed with the principal, a school health care practitioner, a parent teacher organization or school council, and the community school leadership team. It goes to the state and the local school system within 1 year and is published online. The coordinator and principal then measure progress toward the plan's goals at least once every 2 years.

San Francisco Unified's job description for class 2977 groups the work into five areas: coordination, extended learning, community engagement, family engagement, and behavioral health and wellness. Day to day, that means running a coordination of services team that reviews, assigns and follows up on referrals, and hosting a providers meeting at least bi-monthly. It also means paperwork that keeps partnerships legal and funded: memoranda of understanding, joint work plans, and the Board Resolutions that approve partner services and contracts.

Prince George's County Public Schools in Maryland adds a concrete task list of its own. Its coordinator reports to the principal, establishes a family resource center, supervises every partner providing out-of-school-time services, allocates space for student and family support services, and organizes interventions aimed at chronically absent students. The same description puts the coordinator in charge of collecting evaluation data and submitting reports on time.

A week on the job mixes all of this. Monday's referral meeting turns up three families facing eviction notices. Tuesday the partner clinic's nurse practitioner needs a room that the testing coordinator has already booked. Wednesday is a family night with dinner, interpreters and a table from the county benefits office. Thursday goes to entering referral outcomes for the grant report. Friday the coordinator sits with the principal to decide whether the tutoring partner is worth renewing. The coordinator rarely delivers the services directly. The job is making sure they exist, fit the school and reach the right students.

There is no single credential that makes someone a Community School Coordinator, so districts write their own requirements. Two published position descriptions show the range.

San Francisco Unified's minimum is a bachelor's degree plus two years of experience in one or more major student or family support areas, such as academic support, mental health, afterschool programs, youth development, family support or leadership development. Its desired qualifications include a master's degree in education, public administration, social work or a related field, and bilingual, biliterate ability, especially in Spanish, Cantonese or Mandarin.

Prince George's County Public Schools requires a bachelor's degree from an accredited college or university and prefers a master's degree, along with three to five years of related work experience. Its qualification list reads like a summary of the job: experience with federal programs or school improvement, experience coordinating programs in an education, nonprofit or human services setting, experience developing and managing program budgets, and knowledge of research-based strategies for parent, family and community engagement. It also asks for computer literacy in Microsoft Word and Google applications.

Maryland's statute adds two points that apply statewide. The coordinator must understand, respect and demonstrate a high degree of cultural awareness of and competency in the diversity of the community, and the law says the coordinator may be a social worker. It also says the coordinator is hired at the appropriate administrative level.

Common paths into the role, as a rough guide:

• Afterschool or youth development program managers who already work with school principals and partner contracts
• School social workers and family liaisons who want a systems role rather than a caseload
• Community organizers and nonprofit program staff with experience running coalitions or service partnerships
• Teachers who have led family engagement or attendance work and want to move outside the classroom

A typical candidate holds a four-year degree in a field such as social work, public administration, education or human services, and as a rough guide two to five years in youth, family or community programs. A master's degree in education, public administration, social work or a related field matches the preferred qualifications in both descriptions above.

Credentials worth knowing. None is required by the position descriptions above, but candidates from social work may already hold a state social work license, issued by each state's social work licensing board. In California, school-based social workers hold the Pupil Personnel Services Credential in School Social Work from the Commission on Teacher Credentialing.

Skills that matter on the job: facilitating meetings with people who do not report to you, drafting and tracking MOUs, reading attendance and referral data, building simple budgets for grant reports, and explaining school procedures to families in plain language, in more than one language where the community needs it.

Pay. BLS does not report community school coordinators separately. The closest occupation is Community and Social Service Specialists, All Other (SOC 21-1099), a residual group. In elementary and secondary schools, that occupation's May 2025 wages ran from $33,060 at the 10th percentile to $94,270 at the 90th, with a median of $56,960; BLS counted 8,500 such jobs in that industry. Across all industries the occupation's median was $56,730. Coordinators employed by nonprofit partners fall under other industry rows: in Individual and Family Services, the occupation's median was $51,750.

For the step up, BLS's Social and Community Service Managers occupation had a May 2025 median of $80,390. Both San Francisco Unified and Prince George's County describe coordinators working with a Director of Community Schools at the district level.

Job growth. O*NET projects faster than average growth (5% to 6%) for Community and Social Service Specialists, All Other between 2025 and 2035, with 118,600 people employed in 2025 and about 11,600 openings a year on average. Those figures describe the whole residual occupation, not community school coordinators alone.

Funding decides the job market. A coordinator position exists because a district, a state program or a grant pays for it, and the funding picture shifted in 2025.

At the federal level, the U.S. Department of Education's Full-Service Community Schools program received $150 million for new and continuation awards in each of fiscal years 2023, 2024 and 2025, up from $75 million in fiscal 2022. On Dec. 12, 2025, the Department discontinued Full-Service Community Schools grants: a Jan. 11, 2026 letter from U.S. senators put the total at $168 million serving students across 12 states and said nineteen grant recipients received the notices. The senators wrote that the Department claimed the affected grantees violate civil rights law or conflict with the administration's policy priorities, and they demanded the grants be reinstated.

Some states fund community schools directly. California's legislature appropriated over $4 billion for the California Community Schools Partnership Program to support and expand community schools until June 30, 2032. Implementation grants run five years at up to $500,000 annually per school site, depending on enrollment. In May 2025 the State Board of Education approved what the state called the fourth and final round of implementation grants, more than $618 million for 458 school sites. San Francisco Unified's job description states that its coordinator is a full-time position in order to achieve the purposes and goals of the state program.

Maryland also links a deadline to state money: the needs assessment is due within 1 year of a school receiving a personnel grant under Section 5-223 of the Education Article or becoming a community school.

What this means for a job seeker. Before accepting an offer, find out what pays for the position and when that money ends. A district-funded line, a multiyear state grant and a federal discretionary grant carry different levels of risk. Coordinators who can document results, write a clean grant report and keep partners engaged give their principal a case for keeping the position when one funding source runs out.

Dear Ms. Alvarez,

Please accept my application to be Riverside Elementary's next Community School Coordinator. For the past four years I have managed the after-school program at the Eastgate Youth Center, which runs on three elementary campuses in the Northfield district. That job taught me the part of community school work that never shows up in a job posting: getting a principal, a custodian, a nonprofit director and a parent volunteer to agree on who gets the cafeteria at 3:15.

At Eastgate I took over a program with a long waitlist and no shared referral process. I met with each school's counselor, set up a monthly referral review, and built a simple tracking sheet so families heard back within a week instead of waiting until the next semester. I also negotiated agreements with a food bank and a dental clinic to use our space on Thursday evenings, which turned pickup time into a chance for families to get help they had been putting off.

The work I am proudest of is quieter. A grandmother raising two of our students stopped coming to school events after a bad meeting with the front office. I called her every few weeks with good news about the boys, and by spring she was helping run our family nights. Relationships like that one are what make a community school more than a building with services in it.

I would bring that same approach to Riverside: listening first, building a needs assessment with your staff and families, and treating every partner as accountable to the school's goals. I speak Spanish fluently and I am comfortable with evening and weekend hours.

Thank you for considering my application. I would welcome the chance to talk about what Riverside's families need next.

Sincerely, Daniel Reyes