Carver Middle School to become fifth Orange County community partner school
Carver Middle School will become the fifth Orange County school to work directly with local organizations to address students’ barriers to learning, in a program dubbed “Community Partnership Schools.”
The school joins Eccleston Elementary, Evans High, Jones High and OCPS Academic Center for Excellence as community schools in Orange County collaborating with the Children’s Home Society of Florida. The “community school” model works to address educational obstacles such as poverty, food insecurity and access to healthcare by integrating outside services directly into the school ecosystem.
The Children’s Home Society of Florida received $80,000 in state grant funds through UCF to launch the program at Carver Middle, which serves about 650 students. Carver Middle has 100% of its student population classified as “economically disadvantaged”, according to the school’s annual state report card.
Kea Cherfrere, the senior director of community partnership schools at the Home Society said Carver Middle will hold public meetings over the next year to discuss which organizations and services would best fit the needs of the school’s community.
But the work has already begun: On the first day of school, the group worked with parents of Carver Middle students to identify gaps in 7th grade immunizations, she said. The organization then helped parents make doctor appointments to ensure their students wouldn’t miss school because they lacked a required shot.
At other community partner schools in Florida, teacher retention and parental engagement have increased while chronic absenteeism has decreased, Cherfrere said.
“We don’t want to come in and think that we’re the expert and that this is going to be a silver bullet,” she said. “This has definitely been a community — hence ‘community partnership school.’ The model requires so many layers of community to hold us accountable to that. We can’t do it alone.”
Adding Carver Middle to the community partnership program completes a K-12 pipeline with the inclusion of an Orange County middle school, meaning a student can go from kindergarten through graduation in schools with additional resources.
Evans High School, the first Orange County school to become a community partner, has seen its graduation rate soar from 64% to over 90% in the ten years since the partnership started.
Samuel Danner, the principal at Carver Middle, advocated for the community partner program to come to his school after seeing it in action at Evans High. With the program already in place at elementary and high schools in Orange County, Danner said adding a middle school is crucial to offering services during what he calls the “weird zone” of life.
“A lot of work, but it’s worth it, because it helps foster student achievement across the board,” Danner said.