Evaluation of Pittsburgh Area Community Schools’ (PACS) Full-Service Community Schools Model (FSCS) is a 5-year project to evaluate the FSCS initiative within school districts that are newly partnered with PACS. Community schools aim to provide comprehensive basic and enriching supports to students and families that are necessary for student success and leverage broader community resources and partnerships. The evaluation utilizes existing secondary data, gathers primary data, and leverages quantitative and qualitative sources to examine student outcomes, understand school community members’ perceptions of strengths and barriers, and inform PACS’ FSCS approach.
Background
In 2022, PACS received an $8.4 million FSCS grant from the U.S. Department of Education to expand its community school programs to more school districts, increase program staff, and provide training opportunities for staff and community partners. As part of the grant, Child Trends was contracted to evaluate the initiative’s performance and progress—as well as any changes in key student outcome areas, such as attendance, behavior, and school climate—in expansion school districts.
Intended impacts
Through our evaluation, we hope to:
- Understand PACS’ progress toward goals related to collaborative leadership, family engagement, provider landscape, and enrichment opportunities.
- Inform and strengthen PACS programming to meet the shared and unique needs of students, families, and school communities.
- Identify perceived challenges and strengths experienced by students, families, and staff within schools served by PACS.
- Understand the extent to which student outcomes improve over the course of the FSCS initiative within expansion school districts.
Research approach
The evaluation involves a mixed-methods approach to gather data that provides insight into school community needs, programming barriers and facilitators, and strengths and areas for improvement within the FSCS approach. We use secondary and primary quantitative data sources, including publicly available state administrative data and surveys of students and school leaders. Primary qualitative data sources include focus group discussions with students, families, school staff, and community partners. Child Trends and PACS take a collaborative approach to determining adaptations or additions to data sources. As such, Child Trends supports PACS as needed in collecting programmatic data to further inform specific program activities and development of resources.
Timeline
The 5-year evaluation is from 2023 through 2027, with evaluation activities as follows:
- Summer 2023: Annual school leader surveys
- Fall/Winter 2023: Annual collection of secondary administrative data (e.g., attendance, discipline, graduation)
- Fall/Winter 2023: Annual analysis of survey and administrative data
- Fall/Winter 2024: Annual student school climate survey
- Spring 2025: Focus groups with students, families, school staff, and community partners
- Additional data will be collected and resources will be developed as determined in collaboration with PACS.
Learnings
Evaluation reports are submitted to the PACS to inform broader reporting to the funder. PACS prepares blogs that highlight insights from the evaluation, along with links to the full annual evaluation reports on their website.
Other info
The PACS initiative and the corresponding Child Trends evaluation are funded through the Full-Service-Community Schools Program. Grants were initially awarded through the U.S. Department of Education but are funded through the U.S. Department of Labor as of 2026.
Project team members include:
- Joy Thompson, PhD, principal investigator
- Katherine Connolly, MSEd, senior research analyst
- Note: Former team members who are no longer at Child Trends include Mavis Sanders (co-principal investigator), Winnie Chan (co-principal investigator), and Quynh Nhu Dao (research assistant).