Our Story

How We Got Here, and Where We’ve Been

In 2015, The Center for Community School Strategies launched from The Tulsa Area Community Schools Initiative Resource Center, a nearly ten-year alliance of Tulsa education and community leaders brought together to implement the Community School strategy in many of Tulsa’s public schools.

The TACSI story begins in 2006 at a community schools research trip to Baltimore, Maryland, commissioned by the Tulsa Metropolitan Human Services Commission for the purpose of researching an effective strategy to bring to Tulsa to strengthen public schools.

In 2007, TACSI was born to bring to Tulsa what was discovered through ample research and the convening in Baltimore: a rapidly growing, evidence-based national education equity movement known as Community Schools. A community school is a place and a network of supportive partnerships between the school and the community that help children learn, families succeed, neighborhoods engage and communities thrive. With support and resources from the community, community schools care for the whole child – academically, emotionally, physically and socially.

From 2007 – 2013, TACSI provided leadership to create and sustain the 27 community schools that had grown throughout the Tulsa area.

By 2014, TACSI had grown to a strong network of partnerships between Tulsa Public Schools, Union Public Schools, district leaders and community partners, locally unified under a desire to implement community schools as an education equity strategy to support Tulsa’s children and families. Seeing the need to develop a Resource Center to support Community Schools, in 2014, the Community Service Council launched the TACSI Resource Center, administered by the Community Service Council to support and provide resources for Tulsa’s community schools.