If we can't be free to dream of something better for ourselves and the local/global communities on which we all rely so heavily, how will we ever come up with anything better than what we already have.
That said, WHAT IF...
(1) Schools become harbingers of equitable access to education by becoming internet service hubs for their surrounding communities. This means public funding for basic internet service to families with students enrolled in public schools. This would require city plans for school-based internet extensions into surrounding neighborhoods.
Of course, scarcity of things like FiOs and other faster internet broadband services will likely be preferred by those in higher socioeconomic positions and more rural areas with wider community sprawl would likely not benefit from this idea - denser-populated urban areas would be the focus here.
(2) Schools become hubs for promoting self-management and self-regulation for students to be taught more about their own cognitive and psychosocial development as humans, alongside conflict resolution and de-escalation knowledge and strategies.
(3) Shift the purpose of community public schools from being a day school for housing children on reporting on only reading and mathematics. Instead, rebrand public schools as emotional, social, and financial support centers for communities with the intention of providing personalized assistance to families in their communities.
(4) Increase funding for schools in lower socioeconomic communities to provide more intensive support, retraining and hiring school leaders/educators willing and able to provide this kind of shift in personalized emotional, social, and communal support for students as well as their families.
Funding for city healthcare providers and mental health services would find overlap with this shift in school rebranding, particularly if school leaders were trained in communicating developmental needs of students and their families to mental health specialists, as much as they are already trained to do so with academic learning specialists.
The increased funding for these lower socioeconomic areas would account for the higher percentage of families who do not yet have the city and state safety net for providing such services themselves and are creating communities where generational poverty spirals can be meaningfully addressed.
And if you're asking "Where's all this funding going to come from??" then be happy that you find these ideas even worth asking how to find funding because at least we share common ground on what we'd like to see our future become. If we can't agree on where we're headed, we'll likely disagree on how to get there. It's a lot harder to tell people what you think is the best way for communities to prosper than it is to list all the things other people think is what you don't want. Finding a common goal is tough but without it we all will argue amongst ourselves about how we are supposed to make any progress toward a vision we don't have. Progressive tax reform for the super rich and corporate profit loop holes on a national and global scale. World leaders work toward diplomatic common ground on things like trade, climate, hunger, medical research - they can work toward common ground on funding education as a basic human right.
---
"This Public Schools feature dataset is composed of all Public elementary and secondary education facilities in the United States as defined by the Common Core of Data(CCD, https://nces.ed.gov/ccd/ ), National Center for Education Statistics (NCES, https://nces.ed.gov ), US Department of Education for the 2015-2016 school year."
https://hub.arcgis.com/datasets/87376bdb0cb3490cbda39935626f6604_0?geometry=-118.702%2C33.727%2C-117.395%2C33.926