The power and promise of community schools were on display on Nov. 20 as invited educators, politicians and community leaders got an in-depth tour of the Community Health Academy of the Heights (CHAH), one of the UFT’s 24 Community Learning Schools.

“We’re feeling like we are moving in the right direction in New York City,” said UFT Vice President Karen Alford as she introduced the principal of CHAH and the executive director of the Community League of the Heights, a multiservice agency that helped found the school and links it with many outside services.

The principal and the director spoke together, emphasizing the partnership that sustains the school, which is in Washington Heights. “It takes all of us,” said Yvonne Stennett, the league’s executive director. “We are lasting, sustainable, a force to be reckoned with.”

Mayor Bill de Blasio has embraced the community school model, vowing to open 100 new community schools in his first term and recently using the model to underpin his School Renewal Program to revitalize 94 low-performing schools.

“The AFT is totally supportive of the mayor’s investment in community schools as one of a number of strategies to turn around schools that have been struggling,” said AFT President Randi Weingarten, who attended the event.

Representatives from the State Board of Regents, the state Legislature and the City Council listened as panels of speakers from several of the UFT’s Community Learning Schools talked about what it takes to educate children in poverty. The services that the schools provide, the panelists said, keep the students in school and strengthen families.

“It releases the power that teachers, parents and community members have,” said Brenda Shufelt, the librarian at PS 30, the UFT’s community school in East Harlem.

CHAH, one of the union’s original six Community Learning Schools, moved to its new school building two years ago as a 6th- to 12th-grade school by combining students from two different sites and linking the new school tightly to surrounding resources. A clinic, with a full-time pediatrician, a nurse-practitioner, an obstetrician, a lactation counselor, a nutritionist and a health educator, is located in a suite of offices under the school.

Other community partners bring in mental health services, food assistance, mentoring, after-school programs, yoga, sports, and adult GED and ESL classes. UFT retired teachers tutor at the school.

Visitors got a tour of the clinic, classrooms and labs from student guides. Led by 9th-grader Ailani Cruceta, one group saw an AP art class, a bilingual 6th-grade science class, two gyms and a music room with banks of keyboards. Ailani’s former 6th-grade ELA teacher Jean Ellen Murphy, who took up the rear, said that because of the links between the teaching staff and the community service providers, after-school tutoring is coordinated with the day school.

“The after-school teachers check in with me weekly,” she said. “They know what units we are working on; they know I give homework every night.”

After “almost a tale of two schools,” she said, recalling when CHAH was housed at multiple sites and coordination was sporadic, “being able to unify is great.”