What the community school coordinator can teach us about building civic infrastructure that lasts. 

By Danielle LeCourt, Partnership Communications and Narrative Director

In Victor Larsen’s first year as principal of Westmore Elementary in Orem—a school where roughly two-thirds of students qualify for free breakfast and lunch—a student asked him whether there would be extra food while school was out for winter break. It wasn’t idle curiosity for this student. For many kids at Westmore, school meals are the plan for how they eat, and no one had discussed with this student what the plan would be once the building closed.  

Victor didn’t have an answer, so he found one himself by rounding up donors and packing boxes of food, alone. “It took me the whole day,” he said. He did it again the next year, and the year after that. 

Stories like Victor’s are common. A student or family needs something the school can’t provide, so an educator starts making calls, finding partners, building relationships on top of the job they were hired to do. Sometimes those relationships grow into remarkable networks of support. But when they depend on one person holding it together, they stay fragile. 

The community school coordinator exists to make that work less improvised. Part relationship-builder, part organizer, part connector, the coordinator helps turn a collection of people and resources around a school into something closer to a system. And while the day-to-day work can be difficult to define, the larger function is vital: build and systematize the relationships that allow a school and its surrounding community to work together. 

Christa Rowland, a regional director at the Institute for Educational Leadership (IEL), the national backbone for the Coalition for Community Schools, described the coordinator as “the point person for managing relationships and resources that come into a school building,” intentionally tied to academic outcomes. Her preferred image, offered as a former music teacher, is an orchestra. “I think of this person as a conductor who brings together partners so they complement each other, not duplicate each other.” The job is making sure everyone can play together. 

That distinction helps explain why the role can be so difficult to capture in a job description. A community school coordinator isn’t simply another person providing services to students. They’re paying attention to the whole school; including what students and families need, what resources already exist, where the gaps are, and which relationships need to be built or strengthened. And much of what they build takes time—Christa reported that schools may begin seeing results within three years, while the work can take a decade to fully mature. 

That makes Community School Coordinator Appreciation Week, happening now from September 13–19, an opportunity to recognize both the people doing this work and the kind of work they do. In some ways, the goal is to make stories like Victor’s less remarkable—not because the need disappears, but because meeting it no longer depends on one person stepping outside their job to hold everything together. 

The warm handoff 

Victor never had formal training for the fundraising and networking his job now required. What changed things for him was a person: Alyson Madsen, his community school coordinator. Victor makes the first connection with a donor, then does “a warm handoff to my coordinator… so you guys can hammer out the logistics.” Now at Westmore, a food effort that once ate up his entire December now runs through volunteers, feeding over 200 families in under 90 minutes. 

Kyndal White, Community School Coordinator with Granite School District, has held some version of the role for seven years and now covers five schools in the Kearns school network on her own. Her metaphor isn’t musical, but structural: “Our job is like being a major interchange on the interstate,” she said—a way of keeping partners from getting stuck in silos or feeling unseen. 

When she noticed there were opportunities for stronger collaboration between schools and after-school programs, for example, she didn’t just address the immediate need. What began as an effort to close that gap became a standing advisory council where partners could work through issues together. It’s an example of the philosophy that guides her work: “We are better together than we are separately.” 

And that extends to families, too. Parents who arrive in the country unfamiliar with American schools can, once brought into the work, become “some of our greatest leaders and advocates.” 

Victor sees a fairly simple reason more schools don’t work this way: bandwidth. Building and maintaining a network of partners takes time, and without a community school coordinator, that responsibility often gets folded into jobs that are already full. For Victor, it meant essentially “two jobs in one.”  

His own experience makes the difference concrete. He still builds relationships and makes the first call. But now he can make the warm handoff and get back to what he sees as the real work of a principal. With basic needs like food and clothing taken care of, Victor says it’s easier to walk into a classroom and talk with teachers about things like instructional practices. “That’s the part I love about being a principal,” he said, “being an instructional leader, focusing on the instruction.” The food drive was never really about food. It was about clearing a barrier so a principal could get back to doing the part of the job only a principal can do. 

The pattern underneath

None of this is really about one job title. It’s about what has to exist for collaboration to survive contact with real life: someone willing to make the first call, and a system sturdy enough that it doesn’t depend on that person making every call afterward. 

“Their role really is very systemic,” Christa said. “It’s really about setting up those systems and those partnerships that can outlast the role of a coordinator… and create a more healthy ecosystem outside the school community.” In practice, that means a community school coordinator might help set up safe walking routes to school, connect a family to a nearby community garden, or build a senior mentorship program pairing retirees with students. And that work keeps paying off in a neighborhood long after any one coordinator has moved on. 

There’s a term for that spillover effect: social cohesion, the networks of relationships experts point to as the secret sauce behind Utah’s run atop the national rankings. But cohesion isn’t something a group simply has; it’s something people keep doing. The community school coordinator turns goodwill into infrastructure, so it doesn’t vanish the moment one person is tired, transferred, or gone. 

Victor still checks in on the food program each December. But the clearest sign that what he built is working may be that it no longer needs him to hold it together. 

In the image at the top of this piece, a shelf of donated shoes and clothing at Kearns Junior High sits sorted by size and labeled in English and Spanish