At Baltimore Curriculum Project (BCP) charter schools, the role of Community School Coordinator is essential. BCP embraces the community school model, which means that providing wrap-around services for its students and families is as important as what happens in the classroom.
Each school’s Community School Coordinator, hired by that school’s lead community partner, manages and organizes services such as food pantries, uniform closets, outreach opportunities, and programs for mental and physical well-being, and parent engagement.
We spoke with Aaron Trumino, City Springs Elementary / Middle School Community School Coordinator since August 2024, about his work with the school community and City Springs’ lead agency, Elev8 Baltimore.
What’s the core of your work at City Springs?
A: It’s all about relationships. The parents and families need to know that I am here as a resource. Half the battle is communicating that and reaching as many people as possible. Sometimes families don’t know who to turn to for assistance. Even if they do, it can be difficult to ask for help. That’s a common human experience. We want to be independent and do things on our own. My job is to reassure them that I am here to support them and their family.
How did you become a Community School Coordinator?
My original plan was to provide mental health counseling services for college student athletes. I played football in high school in Binghamton, NY, and at Bloomsburg University in central PA. I played at Bloomsburg for six years, which was supposed to be four, but because of COVID and some injuries, I played longer through graduate school. I don’t know if I overstayed my welcome, but I was known as ‘Gramps’ by the end of my career there.
I received my BSW and MSW at Bloomsburg. Early on in college, I realized that there was a bigger world beyond my identity as an athlete. Usually, at the college level, athletes have spent their whole lives playing their sport. It’s often their main identity and how adults, teachers, and coaches engage with them. (Picture here, #26, playing for Bloomsburg.)
My sports background definitely applies to my role at City Springs. Teamwork remains the foundation of my playing days and my work today. My biggest takeaway as an athlete is accountability, both self-accountability and being comfortable holding others accountable.
What inspired you to become a social worker?
I come from a family of social workers. My mom and dad are both social workers, and they encouraged me to explore social work, psychology, and sociology. When I took the intro to social work at Bloomsburg, it was a natural fit. Throughout my undergraduate studies, I started to merge my identities as a collegiate athlete and future social worker, and wanted to take those two backgrounds and skillsets and see where they could merge.
I did research to find existing programs at the college level for student-athletes mental health. In graduate school, I had the opportunity to implement a pilot program called Student Athlete Support Services, a mental health and counseling and case management service for student athletes at Bloomsburg University, as a Social Work Graduate Assistant embedded in the Athletic Department. I have also been a mental health counselor at Colgate University, had a fellowship at Bucknell working with student-athletes’ well-being, and worked as a residential supervisor with Diversified Treatment Alternative Centers in PA.
How did you end up in Baltimore?
My sister and her fiancé moved to Baltimore a few years ago. I have visited a few times and always enjoyed my time in Baltimore, so I was toying with moving here. I moved here in summer 2024 and applied for the role with Elev8. My interview was at City Springs. I didn’t know a whole lot about the Baltimore City School system or Elev8 at the time beyond some preliminary research. At my interview, I learned that if I was hired, I would be assigned to City Springs. I think it’s a great fit for me, and I’m a great fit for them.
What does a typical day look like as a Community School Coordinator?
There’s really nothing typical about any day because you’re kind of more or less like a Swiss Army knife. You have to be very flexible and able to do a lot of different things. I am a team player and step in where I’m asked.
Mr. Trumino (far left) with City Springs’ colleagues
From 8:45 to 9:30 am, I do late passes, and for the rest of the morning, I will do case management, providing what students need like jackets, backpacks, school supplies, whatever is needed. Same thing with parents looking for support for different things. For the rest of the day, I jump in wherever I am needed.
There’s also a lot of event planning, whether it’s regular events like the PTO meetings or planning for the weekly attendance team meetings at City Springs. There’s also daily documentation that goes along with the attendance: phone calls, sending out letters, home visits, all of those things have to be documented.
I also help with 504 and IEP meetings should a student need glasses or whatever the supportive resource might be. My role is to support those students and families so that the student can achieve their IEP goals.
What has been the biggest surprise during your first year?
Definitely the partnership side. Working with our community partners [corporations, organizations, and volunteers] is not something that I had really done a whole lot of work with before. I am a more reserved, introverted person, and my vision of partnerships was more of a sales-type personality. I wasn’t sure if I could do it, but it’s been pleasantly surprising to learn that a lot of businesses, both small businesses and larger corporations, want to help. They want to contribute to the school, whether it’s material donations, financially, or as volunteers. They need someone from the school to reach out to them with a specific ask because there are so many different places in the community that they can volunteer their time or their money. It’s my job to reach out and ask them to support City Springs, from sponsoring a PTO spaghetti dinner to what one of our newer partners, CBRE, has done.
Last year as my first year, supporting our families who are food insecure at Thanksgiving was like baptism by fire. I learned after the fact that you need to plan for Thanksgiving much earlier. Luckily, last year I had a contact at CBRE, an international commercial real estate company with an office in the Inner Harbor. I connected with this person and asked if they were willing and able to support Thanksgiving food baskets for City Springs. It wasn’t difficult at all. CBRE was all on board. I met up with some folks from their team at Costco with the City Springs van, and we went and we picked up the turkeys. They took care of the sides, put them in CBRE bags, and on the day of the event, CBRE staff helped us distribute 60 Thanksgiving dinner bags to our families.
They’ve also donated winter jackets, hats, and gloves in the wintertime. This month, they purchased school supplies, and at our recent Back-to-School Bash, they gave out jugs of laundry detergent, which is something our families identified as a big need.
What qualities are important to have as a Community School Coordinator?
It’s important to know your school’s needs and what needs are already being met by partners. And then what the gaps are. There are a lot of partners or businesses or corporations, when they think of supporting a school like City Springs, they immediately think about food insecurity or clothing. We never want to reject a partner, but we already have weekend backpacks, and that’s a consistent, steady, ongoing partnership with Weekend Backpacks Baltimore.
But we didn’t have someone who would provide laundry detergent. I pitched the idea, and CBRE was on board with it. Now, we can better support students’ learning because they can now come to school with clean clothes, feel good in their clothes and feel good about learning. It all comes down to supporting a person’s dignity.
What are the specific needs for City Springs that community partners should know about?
We need monthly incentives for perfect attendance each month. We started offering incentives like a Game Truck afternoon one month to students who had perfect attendance the previous month. Students notice when their peers get to do these things. I had students tell me that they only missed one day that month, and I would tell them not to miss any days and then they could participate. Perfect attendance is perfect attendance.
There are no parameters on how big or how small the incentive can be. We want students to expect a monthly reward or incentive. It’s positive reinforcement and something they can look forward to as a reward for coming to school every day.
What else do you want to put in place this school year?
We are working on creating monthly parent workshops as part of our PTO meetings, that are moving to Thursday evenings and will include dinner. Asthma Champs is one of the programs for this year. I would love to get outside experts to present programs to our parents that are valuable to them, from physicians to financial information, from workforce development to safety.
We are also planning different events or initiatives that celebrate families, whether it’s celebrating their students’ academic achievements in the classroom, or maybe it’s something that they’ve done in the community. We want to have a family culture fair, too, where families can showcase their culture in the lobby for students and other families, and teachers to see, showcase different artifacts, and talk about different traditions. We want to empower and involve our families, particularly the ESOL students and their families.
When I worked at Bucknell, I tracked the community engagement efforts of individual teams and student athletes and different student athlete groups. I want to incorporate more of this at City Springs with the college athletes at our region’s colleges and universities. Having teams come to City Springs to engage with our students would be incredible and help inspire their futures.
I welcome any community participation in these activities.
Fun facts about Mr. Trumino:
He’s a Detroit Lions Fan. (Surprising for someone raised in Buffalo Bills country, who went to school with Steelers and Eagles fans, and now lives in Baltimore.)
I grew up a Cowboys fan. I had three teams to choose from in NY, but all my uncles were Cowboys fans (funny enough, all three are from Pennsylvania). But now I am a Detroit Lions fan. When Dan Campbell took over as the Lions’ head coach in 2021, before the team was successful, I saw what he was doing with their culture and this whole idea of grit and how that identified with the city of Detroit. His leadership is really neat to see, so I hopped on that culture bandwagon, and then the winning came along.
He loves Old Bay. When he started at City Springs, colleagues gave him a Baltimore-themed gift basket with a can of Old Bay in it. He had never tried it before, but discovered he loves it.
Thanks, Mr. Trumino, for all you do for City Springs.
To contact Mr. Trumino, email him at atrumino@elev8baltimore.org.