Communities In Schools (CIS) is a program that addresses not only academic needs but also the personal, familial, and community barriers that hinder student success. Founded in 1977, CIS has operated for nearly five decades, expanding from a small pilot program to a nationwide network that now serves more than 2 million students in 3,000 schools across 29 states and the District of Columbia.
Funded primarily through private and local sources, CIS staffs high-poverty K–12 schools with an on-site coordinator who connects students to both in-school supports and external community resources including food assistance and housing services. While all students in a CIS school can access the coordinator, a subset of students with greater needs are referred for intensive “case management.” These case-managed students meet with their coordinator nearly once per week.
A recent study conducted in partnership with Harvard’s EdRedesign Lab evaluates the program’s impact on both short-term outcomes such as test scores, absences, and suspensions, and long-term outcomes including high school graduation, college enrollment, and adult earnings. To estimate causal effects, each CIS school is compared with a demographically and academically similar school that never adopted CIS, using more than five years of pre-adoption data to ensure the schools followed similar trends before the program began.
In Texas, where nearly half of all CIS schools are located, researchers linked Texas Education Agency records with CIS administrative data for more than 16 million students enrolled in public schools between 1995 and 2019, 3.3 million of which attended a school that implemented CIS by 2019. Because most Texas programs began after 2010, earnings at age 27 are estimated using the staggered rollout of CIS programs outside Texas. Researchers linked national Census and IRS tax records to track over 689,000 children born between 1978 and 1992 who grew up in neighborhoods that ever hosted a CIS program into adulthood.
The findings indicate that CIS programs in Texas have positive academic impacts. “High-risk” students in CIS middle schools—defined by the authors as those in the top quartile of predicted need, meaning students most likely to face academic or personal barriers—experienced gains in math and reading scores (0.18 and 0.05 standard deviations, respectively) after three years of exposure to the program compared to high-risk students in non-CIS middle schools.
CIS case-managed students receive tailored support based on their needs. “Academic needs” include challenges directly related to learning, such as difficulty with coursework or literacy, while “non-academic” needs refer to barriers outside the classroom like family-related obstacles or food insecurity. Gains in math are nearly twice as large for case-managed students with primarily academic needs than for students with non-academic needs (0.103 vs. 0.056 SD). Based on the sample, case-managed students are disproportionately female (53.4 percent), from racial minority groups (87.2 percent), and low-income (71 percent).
Academically, they begin well behind their peers: Even students at the 75th percentile within this group score below the statewide average in math. Low-risk students experience no effects on their test scores, positive or negative. This finding illustrates that targeted, personalized supports, such as tutoring and housing support, are essential to the program’s success, especially for high-risk students.
In addition, three years of middle school exposure to a CIS program closed 13 percent of the gap in high school graduation rates between high- and low-risk students, with increases of roughly three percentage points for high-risk students, regardless of whether their needs were academic. Although the program had no effect on four-year college enrollment, it increased two-year college attendance by 2.9 percentage points, and raised earnings at age 27 by an average of 1.54 percentile points, or about $1,140 per student annually.
Importantly, only about half the impact on high school graduation is explained by improvements in test scores. The rest can be explained by improvements in non-cognitive measures such as absence and suspension rates. In other words, the program’s impact extends beyond academics, and purely academic metrics may understate its long-term value.
The program is also notably cost-effective compared with other interventions. The authors note that every $1,000 of investment in CIS increases annual earnings at age 27 by $406, compared with roughly $40 for class-size reductions, although critics argue that class size experiments may overestimate positive effects. These results underscore how addressing students’ out-of-school needs can complement and strengthen efforts to improve academic outcomes.
While the researchers clearly explain impacts on school-related outcomes like academics, graduation, and college enrollment, further research could explore how CIS addresses non-school related outcomes like food insecurity, housing status, and mental health. CIS does not replace federal programs like SNAP, Head Start, or TANF, but site coordinators help families access and navigate these and other community resources. During periods of inconsistent and diminished federal support for low-income students and families, the need for strong local coordination becomes even more urgent. When safety-net programs are weakened or fragmented, models like CIS may become even more critical in ensuring that vulnerable students do not fall through the cracks.
SOURCE: Benjamin Goldman and Jamie Gracie, “When Resources Meet Relationships: The Returns to Personalized Supports for Low-Income Students,” Opportunity Insights (December 2025).
