A community school is a place and a set of partnerships connecting a school, the families of students, and the surrounding community. A community school is distinguished by an integrated focus on academics, youth development, family support, health and social services, and community development. The community school strategy is central to efforts to improve America's public schools. Community schools use partnerships to align school and community resources in order to produce successful students, strong families, and engaged communities. This paper outlines how school and community leaders develop a common vision for a community schools strategy and explores six key strategies that successful community school initiatives use to build effective partnerships with local government agencies, teachers' unions, and other organizations. It begins by describing the elements of a community school strategy, then draws on the experiences of several community school initiatives that use the following strategies to form and maintain key relationships: (1) Ensure that all partners share a common vision; (2) Establish formal relationships and collaborative structures to engage stakeholders; (3) Encourage open dialogue about challenges and solution; (4) Engage partners in the use of data; and (5) Create and empower central-office capacity at the district level to sustain community school work; and (6) Leverage community resources and braid funding streams. (Contains 1 figure and 12 endnotes.)