Developmental infrastructure for public schools
Most school investment goes to two places: academic programs and crisis response. Almost nothing funds the coordination layer in between—the infrastructure that keeps academic programs and crisis response from operating in parallel silos. That gap is where we work.
Investment area one
Curriculum, instruction, and learning interventions—SEL programming, wellness curricula; PBIS frameworks, restorative practices, academic interventions. Well-resourced and universally applied.
The missing middle
The shared frameworks, protocols, and adult capacity that allow schools to recognize and respond meaningfully to need needs that surface early on—before they harden into crisis. No dedicated funding category exists for this layer.
Investment area two
Counseling services, threat assessment protocols, SPED referrals, psychiatric evaluation, and the systems activated after escalation—downstream of where the underlying need lives and first presented itself.
01
Educators across a school build a common framework for understanding adolescent development—what healthy socio-development looks like over time, how derailment or developmental drift takes shape, and what school conditions support or undermine healthy functioning. This is a fundamental shift in how adults view the young people in their care.
02
Schools develop structured processes for how educators, counselors, and behavioral health partners communicate and respond together. The goal is early, coordinated response—replacing parallel and disconnected referral pathways with a shared picture of what a student needs and who is accountable for varying layers of care.
03
Embedded counselors, behavioral health partners, and contracted providers are activated through a structured coordination model—with an embedded facilitation and oversight role ensuring that adults across school-based and external systems are responding consistently, not in parallel. This is the layer that closes the gap between a student being seen and a student being served.
“Not by managing behavior differently—but by changing the conditions that produce escalation.”
The Futureschool Collaborative approachA pilot partnership works when three things are true:
That means iteration, documentation, and honest reflection built into the work from the start.
Futureschool embeds across a defined set of school sites—working directly with educators, counselors, and student support personnel to build shared developmental frameworks, establish system-wide protocols, and coordinate across providers to recognize and respond to emerging student need. Districts contribute staff time, institutional access, and leadership engagement. The model is designed to deepen over time: as internal capacity grows, the work becomes less dependent on external facilitation and more owned by the district itself. That transition is the goal.
Futureschool Collaborative, a multi-district initiative of the Oakland Public Education Fund, is working with school systems nationwide to design, test, and scale a new infrastructure layer for public schools. Bloom Collective leads the effort, grounding the work in the realities of school practice through direct engagement with educators and communities.
The initiative is led by Tricia Douglas, doctoral researcher in Transition Design at Carnegie Mellon, and Khalima Bolden-Thompson, PhD, clinical psychologist and neuroscientist. Their partnership brings together systems design, pedagogical depth, and clinical precision at the district level—a partnership model for our time.
The model is grounded in the Design for Development framework (DxD)—a practice-based approach to understanding how learning environments shape identity, belonging, and behavior. Futureschool Collaborative is DxD’s living laboratory at district-level scale.
Moving schools from a behavior management culture to developmental infrastructure.