The NASBE Interview: José Muñoz

José Muñoz is president of the Education Commission of the States and was director of the Coalition for Community Schools at the Institute for Educational Leadership. NASBE President and CEO Paolo DeMaria interviewed him in November 2024.

What led to your passion for working at the intersection of communities and schools?

I’ll take it back to where I grew up, on Sangamon Street in Chicago. Our elementary school was close to where we lived, two or three blocks away. As a young person, I experienced my family members engaging with the school and with teachers. We did a lot of celebrating together. We also went through hard times with one another.

I grew up in the lower end of the economic spectrum. My mom raised four of us by herself. But she was very engaged in our education, which later motivated her to go back and become a teacher herself in her 30s.

That led me into a career working with Boys and Girls Clubs, where we integrally connected with schools. I started out in Las Vegas at a Boys and Girls Club right across the street from a school. There was very little engagement in the out-of-schooltime with the Boys and Girls Club and very low attendance with the middle school across the street. The main reason was the unsafe conditions that children experienced when walking from their homes to the school.

In my role, I worked a lot with moms and dads and uncles and aunties and family members. We began to meet at the Boys and Girls Club, and we invited the administrators and teachers from the school to join. Some instances of violence in the community quickly led to us engaging with people who happened to participate in gangs. From there, we cultivated a safe zone around the schools to allow children and families to move back and forth, and immediately attendance during school and out-of-school activities increased.

I’ll fast forward to my work with community schools. I first engaged with community schools as part of juvenile detention reform. The largest school in New Mexico was the highest-referring school to the juvenile detention center. Working with that school’s administration, we engaged with many family members and put some practices in place so that in six months, they were no longer referring any kids to the juvenile detention center. A key leverage point in that relationship was the school resource officer. The resource officer helped identify how we could create conditions for more kids to stay in school.

I kept working in the community school space and ultimately went on to become the director of the Coalition for Community Schools. Now I serve as president of the Education Commission of the States.

What is the impact of having strong school and community partnerships?

Community and school partnerships cultivate strong relationships. When there are practices put in place where there is regular engagement between the people who work at a school and the people who bring their children to a school, a culture of collaboration is instantly created. Culture is built upon a foundation of strong relationships.

The impact, first, is greater attendance. When the relationship between what’s happening in the home and what’s happening in the school is strong, you start seeing young people feeling more comfortable attending school. As a parent of five, I was more engaged in schools that my children went to where I had stronger connections. It was hard to engage with those who didn’t make the effort to connect, even when I made the effort.

The impact of engagement, beyond attendance, is the connection that a child feels between their school and their community. When they feel that connection, they typically align the values and morals with each other. They communicate more regularly about what’s happening at school and what’s happening at home. As a result, we typically see them advancing in their knowledge and learning.

Also, strong connections between the school and community can lead to more efficient leveraging of the actual dollars that lawmakers invest in schools for the outcomes that everyone wants to see: our children and all learners advancing in their education.

During your time at the Coalition for Community Schools, what results did you see?

To quote Tim McGraw, “I like it, I love it, I want some more of it.” There are nearly 100,000 schools in the country. We knew we needed to reach a tipping point if we had a chance of all schools operating in the way I’ve described.

We had a huge goal, beginning in 2018, of having 25,000 community schools join our coalition by 2025. What I witnessed, since 2016, was increased cultivation of collaboration between communities and schools within states in the form of state coalitions. We saw a rise from zero state coalitions in 2015 to, when I left, about 40. What that means is local communities that were supporting community schools joining together. We had to create that infrastructure.

That led to about 500 communities participating in their schools. Our annual gathering grew in attendance from 1,200 to 5,000 people. Our big role at the Coalition was to foster communication by getting people to talk to each other, getting people on the same page for the advancement of education for everyone. That led to efforts to bridge the communication gap at the federal level. We saw federal allocations for community schools go from $10 million a year to about $150 million a year from 2018 to 2022.

We really focused on improving the communication between schools and their communities. When strong communication happens, you create a different culture where young people and families actually want to come to school. They wake up asking, “When can I go to school?” Our first indicator of impact was student attendance. We wanted to bust open the seams of schools.

COVID messed a lot of that up. But during COVID, we had Town Hall Tuesdays every week, where we heard amazing stories, not just of people getting the necessary means to survive—food, water, health care—but because of the infrastructure of connections between schools and communities that was in place, the impact was even greater.

How do other partners fit into this vision? What are the secrets to connecting them with the classroom?

Let me go back to my first experience with the system of community schools: the Albuquerque Bernalillo County, or ABC, Community School Partnership. I was their first executive director. But before that, I was a participant representing the county manager attending partnership meetings. ABC was a partnership between the city, the county, the school district, the United Way, the University of New Mexico, the community college, and the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.

The impetus of that partnership was to effectuate the administrative efficiency of the funding of programs that supported education. Talk about blended, braided models, that’s the approach they took. When I started as executive director, there was only enough money in the bank to cover my salary for one year. That means I first had to raise money.

But we approached it a little differently. We worked to better use the dollars that were already being committed to schools and programs. It started with a pilot of one school in 2007, and by 2012, we had four schools and some other community-school work happening. We quickly evolved to having 10 schools. Between the public and private partnerships at the local level, we brought together $3 million in funding and kept going.

When I left in 2017, we had 20 community schools with multiple agencies who were contributing. Our role at ABC was to create the conditions for that to happen, with policies, with funding, and through our own practices. My job was to coordinate all that activity.

They achieved their goal to have 60 schools by 2020, and they did it with very little outside money. There was no state funding at first. There was no federal funding. One foundation contributed some resources. But it wasn’t like a big mass of money had come from foundations and private donors or the state. The local government and entities got together, and they just needed the coordination to grow a stronger community partnership.

How do you get people to see the value of leaving their turf at the door and being partners?

First, data is very important. It speaks for itself. Elected officials have a huge responsibility to fulfill the purpose of education, which is to help people to prosper because of it. If we just got educated and did nothing, that wouldn’t help our local communities, our states, or our individual households. So they bear that responsibility. To support that, you have to start with the data. Here’s where we are, here’s where we could get better in different areas, and here are the people who could benefit the most. The language I use is, we can increase the return on your investment if we do XYZ to improve the outcomes of education.

Second, it’s important to plant the seeds for what could happen with tax-based dollars that they already are budgeting. It’s not about adding more; it’s about shifting it.

A couple sayings I used to have formed the principles of our early work: “relationships, relevance, and repetition.” That means being relation-based, so that’s a lot of one-on-ones and group meetings. It needs to be relevant to the people who we’re serving. That’s where the data comes in. And then the repetition part connects to a second principle: “Frequency builds intensity.”

We didn’t do the annual, semiannual, or quarterly meetings routine. Instead, we met once a month at minimum. Using the same principle we were trying to build for community schools, we had to demonstrate strong relationships and partnerships. We had tough conversations. Nobody likes anybody to visit their house and say, “Your furniture’s in the wrong place.” But through greater frequency with once-a-month meetings and in-between meetings, we were able to create, negotiate, and hash out our differences.

We also had a common language. We insisted that you speak in a way that my grandchildren would understand. No jargon. No acronyms. Just describe what you mean. We had a jargon-free, acronym-free zone at our monthly meetings. We found that people from different entities may say the same word but mean something totally different, which is a problem.

The third thing was that I threw out Robert’s Rules of Order, because that’s how everybody operated, and it can be frustrating. When you have Republican and Democrat elected officials, even in cities and counties and school boards, Robert’s Rules can be frustrating because they’re not set up to drive action and they’re not inclusive of other voices.

We abided by open meeting laws, but we actually had real open meetings. Anybody could come to the meeting, and everybody could contribute. As the coordinator, it was also my job to be the facilitator. We had beautiful meetings every month. I learned one hard lesson. It helps to feed people, and you have to do it right. One time, I tried to be cheap and didn’t get burritos. I got packages of bagels, and that was not well liked. So I never did that again!

It still works beautifully today. Now ABC is at 144 schools in Albuquerque Public Schools. I believe around 70 of them are operating as community schools. One powerful indicator of success was that we were working with a number of schools that had been scoring D’s and F’s historically on the state scale. As they transitioned into community schools, within—if not before—three years, they were grading at A, B, and C levels. They went from having diminishing enrollment to having waiting lists.

What are the barriers for schools achieving these kinds of partnerships?

I’d say the biggest barrier is the lack of communication between agencies, between parties, and between entities. It’s not their fault. It’s just like all of us: “I have a job to do, and I’m going to do my job. Please don’t change too much of my job, because I have my indicators of success set up for that.” The biggest barriers are around the principles I abide by: relationships, relevance, and repetition. Frequency matters. And it’s all built around communication.

When I was with the ABC Community School Partnership, there was a community in Albuquerque that didn’t even have GPS coordinates for first responders. It was pretty remote. Young people had to walk over a mile, in some cases, to a water hole to be picked up by the school bus. Then they would get dropped off and walk back. So I gathered a group of elected officials from the city, the county, the school district, and we met out there to watch the buses do drop-offs. Luckily, God made it possible for it to be cold that day. So they were cold as they watched the kids walking in the cold. Within nine weeks, there was a double-wide put up with internet service, GPS coordinates, a better septic system, an organization identified to run afterschool programs, partial funding coming from the state. All of that within nine weeks. That was with mixed party leadership.

What can state policymakers do to create the conditions for these partnerships?

The mission of the Education Commission of the States is to create partnerships between the political and professional forces of education to stimulate the kind of collaboration we need to advance education. To really create these partnerships at the local level, states can be catalyzers. What do I mean by that? Administrations could put practices in place for grant programs for places that want to do it. I’ve been to places where they were forced to do it, and it wasn’t as accepted or implemented with any type of fidelity. It just became something extra for the school communities to do because they had to. States that I’ve seen that actually put policy and funding in place, like a grant program, for those that want to do it, have been pretty successful.

Part of what a state could do to leverage the tax-based dollars they provide, along with the local tax dollars, is to catalyze collaboration. Counties and municipalities, universities, chambers of commerce, and businesses can come together. A policy that states can consider is to allow a joint powers agreement. Only government agencies can enter into a joint powers agreement. What we did at ABC Community School Partnership was have the city, county, and school district develop policies to say, “We want to be part of this partnership.” Once they did that and entered into a joint powers agreement, it became a quasi-governmental agency, where those elected officials were involved and could have conversations about their resources but not dedicate the resources without going to their peers and local entities.

The most powerful contributor to success is having stronger partnerships between schools and communities. Whoever those nonprofits are, whoever the agencies are, it could be flexible if they catalyze it through a grant program. In more places, municipalities and counties are able to leverage their resources for a common purpose.

Right now, the way we deal with the huge physical and mental health needs of our children, which both Republicans and Democrats recognize, is to put the onus on school districts alone. However, counties have strong health programs. Cities do great social service work. They can come together and do that naturally without the state, but the state could catalyze that type of partnership by putting a little bit of taxpayer dollars in the mix, leveraged with local taxpayer dollars. Then, once they form their partnerships, states could bless it forever through joint powers agreements.

States could also support collaboration through their children’s cabinets or their P-20 councils or some other type of structure that brings place-based people together so they can learn from each other’s experiences and find ways to work together. That’s much of the work that Education Commission of the States does. We want folks to learn from their own experiences.

What other advice do you have for policymakers and practitioners?

Play the long game. Wherever you are within the two- and four-year transitions that occur within states’ political systems, begin with the long vision, and work backward to what you need to accomplish with your role. Communication—which means marking out time on the calendars, saying we’re all going to get together for one particular purpose and use data to help guide us to mitigate some of the differences we may have—is so important. We’re going to be human centered and focus on the people we serve and who elected us to these roles. Put things in place that will last past my time. The joint powers agreement grew through a Republican governor, a Democratic governor, a Republican-focused mayor, and a Democratic county commission. The focus on the long game for them helps it to thrive still today.

It’s a “know me, like me, trust me” world. When you put yourself in a place with folks who think differently from you and folks who think like you, they frequently want to keep that relationship going. Taking the long view makes a real difference.