What is a Community Learning Center (CLC)?
The goal of school-based Community Learning Centers is to help re-engage the broader community with the school to support student and family success. By providing a variety of academic and family support services and enrichment programs for children and families, teachers and principals can focus their attention on academics – improving student performance and graduation rates. Each CLC identifies, assembles and coordinates a variety of nonprofit and business partners to offer a unique menu of programs before and after school, during the evenings and on weekends and throughout the year. As a result, CLCs often become the neighborhood’s center of activity.

Why is this important? c
Stronger schools equal stronger communities. Research shows the health, safety, and stability of families and neighborhoods are inextricably linked to student success. Beyond access to health, safety and social services, children need opportunities for recreational, educational, cultural and social opportunities to enrich their lives and help them be successful in life. Those opportunities are often not available to children in urban districts.

Why is The Greater Cincinnati Foundation (GCF) involved?
GCF has made a $1 million commitment to support CLCs because we believe that the best way to reduce racial disparities is through public education. CPS Superintendent Rosa Blackwell is clear that CLCs are key to improving school quality and student performance, so clear that she incorporated a specific goal in the district’s strategic plan approved earlier this year by the Board of Education.

Click here to read about the recent groundbreaking for the new home of the Fairview German Language School, also a CLC.