Background: California's unprecedented grant investment in the community school strategy through the California Community Schools Partnership Program (CCSPP) offers a significant opportunity for transformative, equity-centered, whole-child school reform (Maier & Niebuhr, 2021). Community schools are grounded in partnerships that schools establish with their communities, engaging families' social and cultural backgrounds as assets to develop teaching and learning suited for their students' needs (Blank, et al., 2003). The community school strategy has been proven to be effective in transforming schools, with justice and fairness as key pillars (Maier et al., 2017; Oaks et al., 2017). However, the specific processes by which schools enact such transformation remain underexplored. In 2022, at the beginning of the CCSPP grant, the State Transformational Assistance Center (STAC) released a rubric to guide and gauge the process of transforming schools into Community Schools (STAC, 2024). This rubric outlines five capacity-building strategies that integrate goals and actions that should drive improvements for community schools, describing practices that have been proven effective in meeting schools' needs (Oakes, et al., 2017). These five strategies are: (1) 'Shared Commitment, Understanding, and Priorities'; (2) 'Centering Community-based Learning'; (3) 'Collaborative Leadership'; (4) 'Sustaining Staff and Resources'; and (5) 'Strategic Community Partnerships' (STAC, 2024). These strategies are further elaborated in the "California Community School Framework" (California Department of Education, 2024). This set of strategies offers a "how" for schools to build the structural and organizational capacity for collective efficacy and action aiming at shared goals (STAC, 2024). To support schools through this transformation, the rubric outlines three growth stages for schools: visioning (e.g., communicating, designing, planning, etc.); engaging (e.g., having discussions, collecting data, creating spaces or councils, etc.); and transforming (e.g., expanding, evaluating, presenting, showcasing, etc.). Research Question: This article examines how CCSPP schools are implementing these strategies, identifying which are most commonly reported and how implementation varies across grantees. Although it is still too early to evaluate the results of the implementation of these strategies on educational outcomes, monitoring how they are put into practice offers valuable insight into how schools are implementing the CCSPP grant. To address this, this study uses the CCSPP Annual Progress Report (APR) -- a required survey-style report that all grantees submit annually. It monitors the implementation of the Community School strategy and informs the technical assistance that is provided through the STAC and the broader support system (i.e., regional centers, county offices, and districts). Designed as a reflective rather than accountability tool, the APR favors open-ended questions, which yield rich narrative data but also pose challenges for systematic analysis. Population and Methods: This study focuses on the first cohort of CCSPP grantee school sites and their first two rounds of APR (2022-23 and 2023-24), analyzing their reported implementation of the capacity-building strategies. The APR asks grantees where they position themselves in the growth rubric (visioning, engaging, or transforming) and what accomplishments they showed during the academic year (open-ended). These data are linked to grantees' original application type--whether they identified as a "new," "expanding," or "continuing" community school. To analyze the open-ended responses, this study employs a large language model (GPT-4o) to code the text and identify references to the five strategies. The validity and reliability of using AI for text annotation are evaluated using intercoder agreement and other standard indicators, following current best practices (Törnberg, 2023, 2024; Gilardi et al., 2023; Laurer, 2024). Findings: Preliminary analysis examines both the growth phase in which schools position themselves and whether they mention specific strategies in their reported accomplishments. Findings suggest that schools identifying as "continuing" community schools at the time of their grant application are more likely to report being in the transforming phase by their second year compared to new or expanding community schools. This trend is consistent across all five strategies but is particularly evident for "Sustaining Staff and Resources" and "Strategic Community Partnerships." However, when analyzing which strategies are explicitly mentioned in the accomplishments narratives, "Sustaining Staff and Resources" emerges as the least frequently cited--even among continuing schools. In contrast, "Strategic Community Partnerships" is the most commonly mentioned strategy. In addition, the "Centering Community-Based Learning" strategy appears particularly challenging for schools to operationalize. Only 10% of continuing schools report being in the transformative phase by the end of their second year and just 49% mention it on the accomplishments -- compared to 79% mentioning the other strategies. Taken together, these findings suggest that while schools across California are making progress in building partnerships, there is significant variation in their experiences with implementing strategies aimed at long-term sustainability and staff support. When looking at the open-ended responses with more detail, it provides information on how these strategies look in practice and why continuing schools seem to manage the implementation more thoroughly. For example, from the responses, it can be seen that many schools report that they have accomplished establishing strong partnerships that address community needs. These partnerships look very different and are context-specific, ranging from local businesses that provide career exploration opportunities to higher education institutions that implement mentoring or early college programs. In addition, some schools report that they have accomplished listening to teachers' voices regarding their needs and professional development opportunities, and students' and families' perspectives about the needs of the community. Although accomplishments were achieved, there are still many challenges to sustaining "community-based learning" in the center of Community Schooling. Many schools still face limited resources, scheduling conflicts, and difficulties in maintaining consistent community involvement, which hinders the possibility of bringing the community into the teaching and learning processes. Conclusions: These findings contribute to the literature on school effectiveness along two key dimensions. First, the analysis explores how community schools build the capacity to connect and engage their surrounding communities and systems, and how state-level policy--specifically, the CCSPP grant--can guide the support of school practices. Second, this study highlights a concrete example of a novel methodological contribution by using AI for text annotation. Discussing its results, validity, and limitations would show important implications for the use of AI to code open-ended questions in educational research.