When you walk into the former JCPenney at the Crossroads Mall, there’s a lot to take in.
A patch of ceiling lights illuminates a mountain of boxes, stacked chairs and even a couple of Christmas trees. It’s hard to imagine at the moment, but Santa Fe South Schools Superintendent Chris Brewster hopes to see the department store turn into a full-service health care clinic.
Brewster chairs the board of the Crossroads Renewal Project, a new faith-based nonprofit that hopes to transform a relatively empty mall space into a resource hub. Thanks to donations from groups like Hobby Lobby, the Inasmuch Foundation, Butterfield Foundation and Charter School Growth Fund, the nonprofit is $11.5 million closer to its goal.
The nonprofit purchased the remaining part of the mall that isn’t currently owned by Santa Fe South, which serves about 2,600 students in two anchor stores. Now the nonprofit is in the process of attracting other schools and services to expand into the mall.
If the effort comes together as envisioned, it would host up to 6,000 seats for students to attend school in proximity to a host of provisions, like a no-barrier health care facility, library, grocery store and play spaces. Brewster said it’s based on the community schools strategy, which works to advance equity and lower learning barriers by providing services to support students' and families' well-being.
Equity is something Brewster deeply cares about – especially as superintendent serving an area where 19.9% of people live below the poverty line and students whose well-being ranks among the lowest in the nation. He hopes the nonprofit’s vision will serve and uplift people for generations to come.
‘How can we be a part of the solution?’
The nonprofit formed last year and currently has commitments for about 100,000 square feet of the mall. It’s taking the next six to 12 months to fill out the remaining space, seeking agreements with health care facilities and education support services, government agencies, nonprofits and locally owned businesses.
“It feels like an idea that's embedded in the minds and hearts of many, many people – which means that we can make it happen,” Brewster said. “Because it's way bigger than one person or one committee or one nonprofit. It has to be the gathering of the city around the idea that we should expect children to thrive in Oklahoma City.”
To ensure it’s prioritizing the right solutions, Brewster said a survey was sent out to the families of Santa Fe South’s about 5,000 students. The response was overwhelming, he said, with 760 people filling it out in 12 hours.
What they found is that families want co-located resources like a gym, library, grocery store, banking and access to health care.
Hilltop Clinic, which primarily serves pediatric patients who are on Medicaid or uninsured in South Oklahoma City, is taking the lead on the health care initiative at Crossroads. Its Executive Director, Dr. Reid Hebert, is also a Crossroads Renewal Project board member.
He’s working closely with Kim Swyden, another board member who said he’s “ostensibly retired” but currently does some consulting with faith-based ministries. He formally served as the executive director of Ministries of Jesus, which is located in Edmond and operates charitable medical and dental clinics, licensed counseling, recovery and social services.
“If you take the zip codes in our area, [there are] some of the highest infant mortality rates that you'll find in the metro, some of the highest rates of poverty,” Hebert said. “… And so we want to enter into that and say, ‘We are not the answer to the problem,’ but we want to say, ‘How can we be a part of the solution?’”
Hebert said he envisions an integrated and holistic model, providing high-quality health care, regardless of insurance status. That would include primary care for children and adults alongside other services addressing mental health, dental and pharmaceutical care, or physical therapy. Some would be directly run by Hilltop, while others would be offered through partnerships with other providers.
“We have families that walk miles to come to our clinic,” Hebert said. “Well, if within our clinic, they could also fill their prescription, and get the X-ray that they needed and know that maybe we could set up their counseling appointment, kind of in conjunction, access to care drastically increases.”
The pair is discussing various ways health care services could be funded in Crossroads, including a federally-qualified health center model, a hybrid model and a direct primary care model. Both Swyden and Hebert also belong to the Christian Community Health Fellowship based in Memphis, Tennessee. They visited facilities there to learn about their efforts.
“So, very different ways of approaching it,” Hebert said. “And we're kind of pulling from all of those to try to piece together what this would look like.”
Hebert said when people have access to preventive services, health care costs are reduced and people are more likely to thrive.
“The amount of power that could be released within a community, if we, as a community, sort of take responsibility to invest in and care for the kids there, it's probably difficult to even fathom what it would be,” Hebert said.
How has the community schools strategy worked in other places?
Brewster said he became interested in the community schools strategy while thinking about durable school reforms. It has a presence across the nation as an evidence-based method to promote equity and educational excellence, and strengthen families and communities.
“Health care issues, emotional support systems, family systems, lots and lots of things that are concentrated in the under-resourced communities manifest in the classroom,” Brewster said. “What a community school model does is say 'Well, let's take care of those things for the student and teacher,’ so the teacher can run in their lane, and a student is in a posture where they can really learn well.”
That strategy has taken on different iterations, using federal, state, local, private and public funding. But its core is based on six key practices.
It also heavily relies on community school coordinators, who engage with families and in partnership management to ensure those involved are moving toward the goals schools have set. They are often hired by a school district or community-based organization. Brewster said he expects they will need a full-time coordinator down the line.
If done right, the strategy can lead to better outcomes in attendance, academic achievement and high school graduation rates, according to the Learning Policy Institute.
Christa Rowland, the Institute for Educational Leadership’s western regional director, said, for example, if a school wants to address attendance:
“It doesn't go far enough to just put a food pantry on site and assume that students are hungry and that's why they're not coming to school or to address dental concerns and then assume that a kid with a toothache is going to be back in the classroom,” Rowland said.
It’s important to explore the root causes of challenges, she said.
“Do we have a school climate problem?” Rowland said. “Do we have a student engagement problem where students just really aren't interested in their education? Do we have a family awareness problem where families don't understand that their student has to be in class every day or they miss things?”
Some states have substantially invested in the strategy, including New Mexico, California and New York. Rowland said that investment is often spurred through the work of state coalitions of community school advocates.
Rowland has also personally seen the strategy grow in her home state of Idaho. There, efforts have focused on rural schools to ensure they can become service hubs.
“I think that's a really special thing when it comes to what we're doing here with [the] community schools strategy,” Rowland said. “I think there has been a history of services sort of leaving rural communities and jobs leaving rural communities. And this is really about, how do we reinvigorate those efforts and get those resources back to that local school so that people can come together and access those resources in their hometown.”
There are some community school efforts in Oklahoma, including Union Public Schools, Tulsa Public Schools and Stilwell. The nonprofit Growing Together, for example, secured a nearly $2.5 million full-service community schools grant from the U.S. Department of Education.
Senior Director of Impact and Family Experience Jessica Noonan said the nonprofit works with three Tulsa Public Schools sites. It is also a part of the Communities in Schools Network, which focuses on providing integrated student supports and case management.
Noonan said they’ve seen positive outcomes through their work, including a strengthened social network among parents and improvements in attendance.
She said she’s found it is important to include the people being served as leaders from the very beginning.
“The most important thing is to always be intentional about how you're listening to the community members that you're serving, and what voice do they have in determining how the investments are made and what they look like,” Noonan said. “If that's not part of the process, you risk creating something that doesn't serve the people it was designed to serve.”
The future of the Crossroads Renewal Project
Brewster recognizes people might be skeptical of the venture, saying “nothing ever happens at Crossroads,” or “you should just bulldoze it and build some warehouses.” He called that accurate pessimism, as other efforts have been advertised and haven’t materialized.
He said he doesn’t want to make empty promises.
“We really do frame it as this is what we desire to do,” Brewster said. “'Is this something that's good for you? Is this what you need? Organizations, will you come to a place like this?'"
The Crossroads Renewal Project is working to fill in a $44.5 million gap to get the space tenant-ready. Brewster said the group is fundraising and hopes to utilize the new market tax credit process, which helps spur private investment in low-income communities. He said it helped partially fund Santa Fe South’s high school build out.
Brewster said he’s had conversations with hundreds of potential tenants and is encouraged by the support the project has received so far.
“Regardless of your political background or your economic strata, everybody believes that children should be thriving,” Brewster said. “And that's what we're trying to build this around.”
The goal is to start building out the space in a year and a half and occupy it in 2028, Brewster said.
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