Community School Partnerships Initiative Committee Report

Executive Summary

for Faculty Senate

November 30, 2009

Prepared by Jane K. Fernandes

Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs

Findings and recommendations are based on data from teachers, principals, and central office administrators in our partner school systems and from faculty and staff at UNC Asheville and Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College (AB Tech). All data were collected by, analyzed by and reported by the Community School Partnerships Initiative Committee: Alice Hart, Holly Beveridge, Jim Buckner, Sandra Byrd, Becky Elkin, Jane Fernandes, Barbara Groome, Rory James, Michael Lodico, Jeanne McGlinn, Deborah Miles and Barbara Parker.

Communication

Although UNC Asheville provides many types of outreach programs, much of the community is unaware of what we do. For example, only 233 out of 914 teachers who responded to our survey indicated a partnership with or connection to UNC Asheville. We need to develop effective methods to promote programs/services and publicize accomplishments; a centralized communication system or designated person would be an excellent start.

The committee made the following recommendations to improve communication:

Updating of our web page regularly
Expanding our direct communication, e.g., email
Providing additional opportunities for parents and students to explore our offerings

Quality assurance

Although training and outcomes assessment are components of some outreach programs (e.g., AVID tutoring), the lack of comprehensive training and assessment programs hinders our success and also our ability to plan effectively for the future. As one Asheville Community Schools principal noted in a focus group, it is counterproductive to send untrained students to serve as classroom assistants. Adding ongoing assessment to required training will ensure that we know whether our programs are effective and ensure that programs continue to link to our strategic goals and our partners’ critical needs.

The committee made the following recommendations to improve program quality:

Identifying the critical needs among our partners
Aligning those needs with university strategic goals
Collaborating to design programs and training modules to address needs
Developing short- and long-term assessment of program outcomes

Professional development/collaboration

Although our current professional development offerings (via USTEP) are well regarded by partner schools, there are opportunities for UNC Asheville to take a leadership role that could enhance our regional presence. For example, central office personnel noted that it is difficult for individual school districts to provide the training needed to help teachers stay current in such areas as the arts, health and wellness, and the environment, and that our faculty can play an important role in filling this gap. WCU actually has established a “talent bank” to link teachers with faculty. It also provides an opportunity to establish informal professional communities in which faculty and K-12 teachers can interact as colleagues, something particularly valuable for teachers at smaller schools who may be without colleagues in their specialty areas. Creating a similar enterprise here also could facilitate improved communication and coordination of our efforts.

The committee made the following recommendations to improve professional development:

Developing regular mechanisms for faculty to provide content-area updates to teachers
Establishing an interactive “talent bank” of offerings available to K-12 teachers
Organizing professional development initiatives in priority areas such as health and wellness, craft and art, and climate and technology

Coordination

Although respondents are very satisfied with the outreach and programs we provide, there is unevenness in our service patterns. For example, recent data indicate that 60% of our offerings target grades 6-12, and that Asheville City Schools and Buncombe County Schools receive significantly more services than Henderson and McDowell Counties. These patterns are understandable—our disciplinary focus fits better with the work of the 6-12 teacher, and nearby counties are easier to service—but they need not be immutable. While acknowledging the challenge of sending many UNC Asheville tutors to Henderson County, a colleague there noted that an alternative could be an on-campus tutor-training program for high school students so that they could fill the need for tutors in the lower grades. Being well informed about our partners’ needs will let us maximize the effectiveness of our efforts and ensure that we do not duplicate available services/training.

The committee made the following recommendations to improve coordination:

Developing internal mechanisms to coordinate university/school partnerships (using existing personnel until fund are available)
Developing collaborative systems with regional education providers (i.e., our four partner districts, WRESA, AB Tech) to coordinate services

Pre-college outreach

Although we offer myriad programs to seek out and connect with promising pre-college students, there is no coherence to our efforts. For example, a table categorizing survey responses from 122 faculty and staff indicated participation in almost 60 different types of pre-college programming. Many departments/units appear to have no involvement, whereas others are represented numerous times. More importantly, there are cases in which activities identified by partners as of great value (e.g., college tours for groups of students) are not offered on a regular basis. We again see a lack of alignment of community needs with university resources.

The committee made the following recommendations to improve pre-college outreach:

Developing a talent bank/speaker’s bureau as a clearinghouse to match faculty expertise with school needs, possibly incorporating an online request form
Providing incentives for faculty to get involved, at least as tutors or mentors if not content area experts
Increasing opportunities for students in middle school and beyond to visit campus on a regular basis

Concluding comments

The committee’s report affirmed what we suspected to be the case:

· UNC Asheville is providing a wide variety of programs and services to the public school community, and those participating in programs and receiving services report a high degree of satisfaction.

· UNC Asheville is not able to coordinate and evaluate these activities to ensure that we are providing effective programs/services in a cost effective way. Even our premier program, Super Saturday, in place for over 20 years, has never been the subject of a full evaluation with long-term follow-up of students.

The bottom line is a clear but difficult choice in the context of the current budget shortfall: Can we afford to devote resources to addressing these issues, or can we afford not to? With this tension likely to exist for the foreseeable future, incremental steps may be the only option. I suggest the following for the coming year:

1. In consultation with the Chancellor, the Provost needs to designate publically a point person on campus to track community-school activities and needs.

2. The University should launch an actual Web page called Community School Partnerships on which we can: (a) highlight some of our successful activities; (b) post online forms for off-campus people to let us know of activities/help they would like to request (i.e., a quick and simple way to start a needs assessment) and for on-campus people to file a report on a planned or completed event (i.e., a quick and simple way to inventory events). Successful activities/events should be moved up to the home page to be highlighted.

3. We should require that no students are sent into the community without some formal training program. This will be difficult if the activity is generated by a student organization but we should be clear that the University has standards we expect to be met.

4. We should ask all people participating in any type of event to complete a feedback form (i.e., a required assessment).

If we start with the above actions next year, I think they would be fairly simple to arrange and they would have a potentially high payoff. After next year, we would review and make plans for further incremental steps to be taken on the Committee’s recommendations.