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The COVID-19 pandemic represented a critical turning point for Italian small and rural schools. In such contexts, school closure entails not only educational discontinuity but also social and demographic weakening. Building on a multi-year research trajectory conducted within the “Movimento Nazionale delle Piccole Scuole”, this paper reconstructs the pedagogical and institutional evolution that led from proximity schooling during the pandemic to the conceptualization of small schools as community hubs, coherently aligned with the OECD (2020) future schooling scenarios. The pedagogical framework integrates four interconnected perspectives. First, the critique of the forme scolaire (Maulini & Perrenoud, 2005; Vincent, 1994; Landri, 2020), whose organizational closure is challenged by small schools’ multi-age structures and strong territorial embeddedness. Second, democratic and ecological pedagogies (Dewey, 1902; Bronfenbrenner, 1979), which conceive the school as a participatory micro-society embedded within relational systems where democratic habits are cultivated through cooperation and civic engagement. Third, the notion of proximity schooling as theorized in INDIRE studies (Mangione & Cannella, 2022; Chipa et al., 2025), where territorial alliances—often formalized through Educational Pacts—mediate between curriculum, local identity and social justice, integrating formal, non-formal and informal learning within a shared responsibility framework. Fourth, the distinction between the extended or diffused school (Mangione, Cannella & Chipa, 2025) and the community school as learning hub (Chipa et al., 2025). While the extended school expands pedagogical environments by framing the territory as co-educator, the community hub represents a structurally consolidated configuration in which alliances evolve into stable multi-agency governance infrastructures, enabling the school to act as a civic and socio-educational stronghold. Within this evolution, alliances progressively move beyond pedagogical collaboration toward coordinated multi-agency frameworks integrating curricular provision with extracurricular services, skilling and reskilling initiatives, socio-educational support, cultural mediation and health-related interventions. The school thus shifts from being an expanded learning environment to becoming a territorially embedded welfare and learning hub. Methodologically, the study adopts a phenomenological and interpretative orientation (Bertolini, 1988; Giorgi, 2009; van Manen, 2014) within contemporary qualitative research traditions (Denzin & Lincoln, 2018). Conceiving educational transformation as lived and situated experience, the inquiry develops as a longitudinal qualitative research pathway combining instrumental case studies (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016; Yin, 2018) with narrative inquiry and situated observation of practices enacted in fragile contexts. Cases were selected for their generative value in illuminating emerging configurations of school form rather than for statistical representativeness. The analysis is guided by the conceptual framework of the forme scolaire, used as an interpretative lens to examine how small schools reconfigure key dimensions of schooling—such as the organization of space and time, pedagogical relationships, and the boundaries between school and community. In addition, perspectives from futures studies in education frame reflection on possible school futures as a reflexive exercise through which institutions reinterpret their role and open new spaces of action in the present (Facer, 2021; Landri, 2024). Findings indicate that the transition from proximity schooling to community hub thus represents not an emergency response but an evolutionary redefinition of school form in fragile territories.