Program brings together Oak Hills Local School District and Mount St. Joseph University students

Over on the West Side, Oak Hills Local School District and Mount St. Joseph University have found a way to work together to benefit both their students.

It all started eight years ago when Brian Conners joined C.O. Harrison Elementary School as its principal and saw how close the two schools were to each other.

“It has always been my focus to try to partner up with the universities because when I went through school at Northern Kentucky University, we did something similar with Covington Holmes High School. And I got the most out of that experience,” he says. “[However], I’ve never had the opportunity to have such a close university right in the backyard that could do that.”

He approached the university about creating a partnership and together they agreed to have MSJ students come to C.O. Harrison to help with literacy tutoring. While the help was appreciated, Conners had been hearing from his teachers that they were interested in math intervention. So he and the school pitched a new idea: What about a practicum math class at C.O. Harrison for MSJ students paired with math intervention for the elementary students?

“It just blossomed from there,” says Conners.

This unique program paired well with the approach of MSJ’s School of Education. “The math [class] is a first practicum for what are called dual license students,” says Lucie Collier, an early education faculty instructor at MSJ. “I’m not sure there’s anything completely like it hardly anywhere. They are working on degrees or licensure for teaching in both elementary, which is preschool to grade five, and special education, which is K-12. When they graduate, they’ll be able to get licenses to teach both, which is unusual.”

For the program, about 100 sophomore MSJ education students come to C.O. Harrison twice a week. At the school, they have one hour of instruction with a Mount instructor, followed by two hours of taking what they learned into K-3 classrooms.

“We were getting, for lack of a better term, free tutoring out of it with our kids—a free one-on-one with people that wanted to be teachers and were training to be teachers with best practice training,” says Conners. “And their students were getting best practice training on doing the strategies they were learning in class and being able to put ‘em to use.”

Both schools found additional benefits with the programs as well. C.O. Harrison teachers enjoyed the opportunity to work with young, enthusiastic teachers in training that were there to help and MSJ students were exposed to a real working school atmosphere. Conners says another bonus was getting to meet future teachers, which could provide OHLSD with access to talent down the road.

While the program has been a success, Conners sees additional ways for OHLSD and MSJ to partner together. C.O. Harrison, for example, has already started bringing in the MSJ football twice a year to read books with second graders. And Delhi Middle School, which Conners became principal of this year, is working with Colliers and MSJ to bring in college students as paid tutors.

“I would always tell everybody, ‘I don’t want students who are in college to have one experience.’ I didn’t want C.O. to be the only experience that Mount St. Joe’s students had,” he says. “I wanted them to see other schools as well, but I wanted every student at Mount St. Joe to see C.O. at least one time because I was so proud of what was going on at C.O. I thought we were a great model for future teachers to see this is what education should look like.”