Community schools have emerged as a popular strategy nationwide to offer shared leadership and expanded services to students and communities. In Chicago, this reform has been adapted as a means of redressing disinvestment from neighborhood schools, offering increased funding and expanded programming through partner agencies. While research into the outcomes of such initiatives is ongoing, this study addresses how these schools are shaping the lives of parents and community members beyond their direct implications for youth. Through Bourdieu's social capital framework, this study uses an ethnographic and parent-centered lens to focus on community schools in Brighton Park, a neighborhood on the southwest side of Chicago, revealing how these schools cultivate pro-social norms and rich networks of trust within and around the schools, and the importance of these practices on the social capital available to parents and local communities. By integrating discussions of social capital theory with emerging literature on community schools, this research interrogates the role of community schools in modifying patterns of inequality through social capital networks. This paper argues that Brighton Park's community schools, by creating community- and parent-oriented spaces for socialization as well as social service administration, create and cultivate informal parental networks that can lead them to key resources. Furthermore, for Brighton Park's predominantly Hispanic population, many of whom are migrants, community schools offer new avenues into bureaucratic spaces of school leadership, providing connections and resources necessary to influence school decision-making across parental engagement styles as networkers, skill-builders, and socializers.
Michael Guilmette (2024) studied this question.