7 Characteristics of a Successful School Community
What makes a successful school community isn't test scores alone. It's the hidden curriculum. Seven characteristics I associate with strong school communities: a positive culture, real business partnerships, an active PTA, steady volunteers, influence beyond your own district, creative funding, and the habit of telling your own story.
What makes some communities better than others for education? Much like a good pizza, it comes down to the mix of ingredients. One person can assemble them. A team does it better.
That team is your school community: staff, families, students, and the local businesses and institutions with a stake in the building. Achievement data showing growth for all students is one measure of success. I hope it isn't your only one. Kind, compassionate, tolerant students matter just as much, and that's harder to put on a report card.
That's the hidden curriculum, the factors besides academics that set schools apart. They're difficult to quantify, and what follows is my own framework rather than established criteria for school success. These are the seven characteristics I've come to associate with strong school communities.
| Characteristic | How you'd know |
|---|---|
| Positive school culture with strong leadership | Every adult, crossing guard to superintendent, treats students the same way |
| Strong business and community partnerships | Partners can name the difference they're making |
| An active PTA or PTO | Meetings outgrow the room they booked |
| High volunteerism, even without immediate stakeholders | People with no child in the building show up anyway |
| Impact that reaches past your own district | Other schools ask to copy what you do |
| Funding solutions | You raise more money, and raise achievement without it |
| Positive stories outweighing the negative | Your school tells its own story first |
Positive School Culture with Strong Leadership
Bill Daggett of the International Center for Leadership in Education has argued that culture trumps strategy in schools. That squares with what I've seen. Walk into a building with a strong culture and you know it immediately, before anyone hands you a data sheet.
That culture takes strong leadership and a willingness to make every decision around students. It doesn't matter whether it's the crossing guard or the superintendent. How staff treats people, students in particular, is what sets these schools apart.
It has to reach students, not just adults. Students need to feel they belong before much learning happens. That shows in whether they're greeted by name, whether they have words for what they need, and whether they'd call this their school.
In an earlier post, 212 Degrees of Customer Service in Education, I wrote about the five-minute walkthrough. In a visitor's first five minutes, what does your school communicate? Here's what I watch for.
| Interaction | What to look for | Warning sign |
|---|---|---|
| Staff to community member | A greeting inside five minutes, or directions to the office | Heads stay down and the visitor wanders |
| Staff to staff | Greetings, laughter, proactive language in hallways and workrooms | Adults pass each other without speaking |
| Staff to student | Positive words while correcting behavior, trained de-escalation when a student melts down | Correction delivered by volume |
| Student to staff | Students with the vocabulary to say what they need, and respect in words, tone, and face | Shutting down or blowing up are the only two options |
| Student to student | Compassion and tolerance in most of what you overhear | Kindness appears only when an adult is listening |
Take the 5-Minute Challenge. Have staff run it, then parents, unannounced. Expect behavior problems in any five-minute window, because that's a school. You're judging how the adults respond.
Strong Business and Community Partnerships
Partnerships are hard to find and harder to keep. Schools sit somewhere on a spectrum: at one end you're trying to get anyone to support you, at the other you're choosing which partner fits a specific need.
Getting off that first end isn't only the superintendent's job. Every position carries influence, and I wouldn't assume a lunch lady has no pull with local business owners, because she usually does.
Most partners already share your goal. Keeping them takes communication, compromise, and celebration. Educators forget the last one. Every partner wants to know they're making a difference, and showing them is on us.
Get this right, and it compounds. Everyone wants to be part of something working, and a school foundation is a good place to start.
An Active PTA or PTO
Not every successful school has a strong PTA or PTO, but it helps enormously. Parents and guardians are a key ingredient in a high-achieving school. We have students for roughly 1,000 hours a school year. A parent or guardian has them for all the rest.
A PTA exists to support student learning. They fundraise, volunteer in classrooms, and run service-oriented events. Teachers and leadership shape what that looks like.
If yours is weak, start with teachers rather than parents. Ask staff to attend, then ask each of them to bring one parent or community member. A meeting of three becomes a meeting of twenty faster than you'd think.
High Volunteerism, Even Without Immediate Stakeholders
Volunteerism gets dismissed as soft. How many volunteers walked through your doors today? Does anyone track it? Start.
The visible payoff is the work they do with students. The invisible one matters more. Volunteers talk to other community members about your school, and that conversation happens whether what they say is positive or negative.
If you believe it takes a village, you can't teach on an island. Volunteers bring skills in reading, writing, a trade, or the patience to sit with a kid who needs it. Some of the best are retired professionals giving something back.
Put the right people in the right work. Volunteer screening, background checks, supervision, confidentiality, and which duties a volunteer may perform can all be governed by state law and district policy, so follow the screening and supervision requirements that apply to your school. Knowing your volunteers well is a starting point, not a substitute for those requirements.
Your base is strong when people with no child in the building start showing up. Worth thinking about how those people vote whenever school funding reaches a ballot in your area.
Impact That Reaches Past Your Own District
Some evaluation frameworks describe their highest performance level as including leadership or influence beyond the classroom. Criteria vary by the locally adopted system, so check the framework your district actually uses. Where that description holds, it points at a teacher whose reach extends past their own room into the school, the community, sometimes the state. Schools work the same way.
The best ones reach outward, connecting with strong schools nearby, across the state, or across the country. A two-way exchange of practice follows, and they push each other.
The Ron Clark Academy is one example. I call it a movement because so much of what they believe is surfacing in schools nationwide: high-energy engagement, and learning treated as worth celebrating.
Your school probably has a strategy others would copy. Sharing it is what makes a learning community successful.
Finding Funding Solutions
Plenty of schools are asked to take on new requirements without a matching increase in funding, though how often that happens and what it costs varies by state and district. Funding mechanisms vary just as much. Some districts lean heavily on voter-approved property-tax levies; others draw more from state formulas or other local revenue, so find out how yours is actually funded before you plan around it.
Poverty and student achievement are linked. It isn't destiny, and it isn't the final word on any individual student, but the relationship between community income and achievement data is consistent enough to plan around.
Successful schools find money. They tell their story, grow their partnerships, and fund the experiences their community actually values. They treat public dollars carefully, because that's what earns the community's trust the next time more is asked of it.
Some improvements don't depend on a new program. In John Hattie's synthesis of education research, collective teacher efficacy is reported among the influences with the largest effect on achievement. That's the shared staff belief that together they can move learning, all pulling toward one vision. It's a cheaper lever than most, but not a free one: collaboration, professional learning, planning time, and staffing structures all carry costs.
When programs get cut, experiences narrow, and some families leave. Compensation can be one factor in whether teachers stay, alongside working conditions, leadership, workload, and how supported they feel. Building a reason to stay, for staff and families both, is worth real money.
Positive Stories Outweigh the Negative
Successful schools tell their students' stories themselves. If you're not telling it, someone else is, and you may not like their version.
You can't win by arguing with negativity directly. Taking on public criticism head-on invites more of it. Crowd it out instead.
A mantra I use with staff: the loudest voice in the room is heard best. Be the loudest, and be positive. Then find new ways to get real stories in front of families and the community.
Do that consistently and negativity shrinks relative to the actual work. You might ask when schools became news agencies. The successful ones already are, because it's the only way an accurate picture gets out. Some will call it self-promotion. We're competing to keep the families we have and attract the ones we don't.
In my experience, the strongest school communities show most of these seven. Evaluate yours honestly and find the gap. With a growth mindset, there's always something to work toward.
What do you believe is missing from this list?
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a school community?
A school community is everyone with a stake in the building: staff, students, families and guardians, and the local businesses, organizations, and institutions that support it. A school that treats its community as staff-only has already narrowed what it can accomplish.
What makes a successful school community?
There's no single agreed-upon checklist for this. What I offer here are seven characteristics I associate with strong school communities: a positive culture backed by strong leadership, durable community partnerships, an active PTA or PTO, high volunteerism, influence past the district, workable funding, and positive stories that outweigh negative ones. Treat them as a framework for self-evaluation rather than as criteria.
How can I tell whether my school has a positive culture?
Watch the first five minutes. Track five kinds of interaction: staff to community member, staff to staff, staff to student, student to staff, and student to student, then have parents run the same walkthrough unannounced. Their read will differ from yours, and that gap is the useful part.
Does a strong PTA or PTO really affect student achievement?
Family engagement is one of the better-supported influences in education research, though the effect size varies by how engagement is measured. A PTA is one vehicle for it, not the only one. What matters is whether families are meaningfully involved, not whether the group has a formal name.
- Achievement data isn't the whole picture - the hidden curriculum is worth weighing alongside it, and the seven characteristics here are one practitioner's framework, not established criteria.
- Culture is visible in five minutes - run the walkthrough with staff, then parents, unannounced, and judge how adults respond to problems rather than whether problems happen.
- Every role carries influence - the staff member you'd least expect often has the most community pull.
- Volunteers carry your reputation - they talk to the community whether you manage that relationship or not, and their screening and supervision follow your state and district requirements rather than your instincts.
- Some improvements are cheaper than others - collective teacher efficacy leans on alignment more than budget, though collaboration and planning time still carry costs.
- Tell your story first - you can't out-argue negativity, so crowd it out with an accurate account of your building.
If you want to build the kind of culture described here rather than just work inside one, credentials tend to be part of that. Administrator certification requirements vary by state and by role, covering the required degree or program, teaching and administrative experience, internships, assessments, and credential type. The educational leadership and administration programs listed on this page include options built for working educators, and it's worth verifying that a program meets administrator certification or licensure requirements in the state where you intend to work.
As a 5th grade teacher, in 2010 Jon won the Presidential Award for Elementary Math and Science Teaching (PAEMST). As a principal, his school won the 2012 Blue Ribbon Award. In 2018, he won the National Distinguished Principal Award (NDP). In 2019 he won the National No Kid Hungry Breakfast Hero Award.
Jon is the author of three guides published on teacher.org: An Educator's Guide to Combat Bullying & Bully Prevention; Teacher Evaluation: A Transition Guide to Exemplary Performance; and You are the Wild Card: Infusing Fun Back into Curriculum. He has authored a children's picture book that was released January 2019 titled Benjamin’s Visit to Principal Reads Office…again! (available at www.archwaypublishing.com)
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