Partnership with Children also provides a full-time social worker and two part-time interns. They help connect families that have legal, housing or medical issues to resources, and they run courses in each classroom on topics like how to deal with strong emotions.

They also see 14 children weekly in individual counseling and 24 in groups where they use art or other activities to work through difficult issues and trauma.

The counseling “is as important as the academic piece. We have been able to develop a culture where they learn that there are people here to support them,” Jackson said. “They can reach out through words and art rather than belittling others and lashing out. And they are expected to do so.”

Bar-Zemer said a “student sorter” program given to all the Renewal schools has also been very useful. She can filter student attendance by commute time, past attendance, counseling status, and class. One pattern they found was that attendance is higher across the board on the days the school has its art program.

“It allows us to look at problems and also celebrate successes,” Jackson said.

But not all the Renewal schools have made the same progress as P.S. 67.

By the program’s own measurements, a number of schools have not succeeded. More than one-third of the schools haven’t met even half of their own goals for attendance, academic progress, and other improvements. Among its 31 high schools, graduation rates increased in 21 and decreased in eight last year over 2015 (two stayed the same).

Community-school advocates blame the failures on the rollout and management, not the program itself. To begin with, not all the principals in the schools dubbed Renewal were convinced of the community-school model. Some new principals had no idea what a community school was. And not all of the superintendents who did the hiring fully understood what was required in a community school.

In addition, because the 86 current Renewal schools are spread among 27 different superintendents, the average superintendent has just two or three Renewal schools among the roughly 50 he or she oversees.

And the rollout has been undeniably messy. For example, it wasn’t until this past August, more than a year after the program began, that the city held its first meeting between principals and community-school directors to discuss the most effective ways to build a community school.

That lack of coordination has played out at the school level, too. At one school in the Bronx, for example, the community partner and the principal didn’t meet until the first day of school last year. The crush of the first weeks of school and the tensions that ensued meant that community staffers were not in place to lead the extra hour of learning time until November. And no mental-health services were available in the school until January.