COMMUNITY PARTNERSHIPS GALVANIZE ACTION

COMMUNITY PARTNERSHIPS GALVANIZE ACTION partnership

Norfolk Academy’s Philosophy and Objectives puts “unselfishness,” “a just society,” and “responsibility for service to others,” at the heart of instilling moral character in students — a goal that the school elevates above academic achievement. Given the centrality of those ideals, it’s not surprising that the school’s approach to serving the community can seem not merely fast-paced but nearly non-stop.

But when the pandemic hit, the school had to hit the pause button on many service projects, observes Bernie McMahon, who directs the Upper School’s student activities and is the founder and director of Leadership Lab. While disappointing at first, the break in the action wasn’t entirely bad, he said. “So rarely in our busy lives do we get a chance to pause. It gave us time to think and innovate.”

That enforced pause created “a Covid success story,” he said. It is a reinvention of the school’s approach to community service that is still evolving, but already requires new language to capture its intent.

Community service is now community engagement. “Service for some reason has a one-way focus to it — I serve the ball, I serve the food, and you receive it,” McMahon notes. “Engagement is a two-way street. We engage with our community as much as they can engage with us in what I call persistent partnerships.”

The principles behind the revitalized approach arose from work done because of the school’s latest strategic plan, Creating a Just Society: Integrity, Leadership, and Pluralism. The Leadership Committee was formed to develop initiatives related to that pillar of the strategic plan. The committee’s faculty leaders researched independent schools and colleges with innovative approaches to community engagement and traveled to some of them for a firsthand look, said Linda Gorsline, Associate Headmaster and Upper School Director.

In particular, the Haas Center at Stanford University, which Gorsline visited, had local outreach projects that drew students into sustained work with community partners.

In addition, she noted, the Fellows Programs of the Batten Leadership Program have also demonstrated the educational impact of multi-year involvement with organizations that have deep roots in a community. For example, the Literacy Fellows have worked for seven years at Tidewater Park Elementary, and the Global Health Fellows worked for many years with Midwives for Haiti.

Several Upper School clubs also have well-established partnerships, McMahon observes. The Happy Club, formed in 1982 to support Operation Smile, has served as the model for student-led clubs at schools across the nation. Academy has had a longstanding partnership with the Special Olympics; the Norfolk Team has practiced on campus for decades, and the Upper School’s Special Olympics Club, which started in 2012, helps with practices, assists with regional tournaments, and hosts a holiday party.

This year, the Upper School structured community engagement around five broad topics with a steering committee of students to coordinate activities and develop educational presentations at Chapels:

• Quality Education • Health, Wellness, and Nutrition • Global Engagement • Advancing Equity • Climate Sustainability & Environmental Action

The Middle School is also retooling its model for involvement to promote more active engagement, said Middle School Director Jeff Boyd. In his first year at Academy, Boyd said he can already see the power of

BELOW: Middle School students bring in thousands of cans to support the local Foodbank.

is a two- way street

the Fellows model. In addition, he was involved in a successful, multi-year effort to build more community partnerships at his previous school, Durham Academy.

“Does it require more time investment? Yes, it does,” he said. “However, there is incredible value in the process, the thinking that goes into it, and the relationships that are built.”

He is working closely with Betsy Guzik, who leads the Middle School’s community engagement, to plan new directions for programming, particularly when Covid restrictions ease. They have discussed giving students a chance to identify areas of interest, so that students are more invested in the work they pursue.

“The focus is less on accomplishing a task than on the relationships and partnerships you’re building,” Boyd says. Those relationships are galvanizing, and the time spent to develop them produces not only intangible benefits, but also concrete achievements that make the community better, he notes. “Together, you want to accomplish a project.” ◆ NORFOLK ACADEMY CONTRIBUTES TO TWO STUDIES ON SCHOOL SAFETY DURING THE PANDEMIC

Norfolk Academy’s testing data and protocols for in-person learning and bus transportation have served as the basis for two peer-reviewed journal articles that provided guidance for schools seeking to conduct in-person learning safely.

The studies, published in the Journal of School Health, were observational and retrospective in nature. Norfolk Academy supplied anonymized data about the number of cases for each round of the school’s surveillance testing and the category of individual (Lower, Middle, or Upper School student, faculty, or staff) that had tested positive, comparable to the data that the school posted weekly on the Covid-19 Resource Board.

That basic case data, along with specifics about Academy’s protocols, provided insight about ways to get students to school safely and carry out in-person learning. • The first study, which was printed in the May 2021 issue, compared two private schools, described only as School A (in the Southeast) and School B (Norfolk Academy, described as “in the mid-Atlantic”), which were conducting surveillance testing during the fall semester of 2020 (August–December); this was the period when many schools around the country remained in virtual learning. Researchers, including Dr. Jonathan Zenilman of Johns Hopkins University, who served as a medical advisor to Norfolk Academy, compared the two schools’ similar protocols, which included masking, social distancing, increased spacing of desks, and limits on the size of gatherings. Both schools did surveillance testing of their entire school communities using the SalivaDirect Yale protocol and PCR tests. The study concluded that although children can transmit the virus, “rates of COVID-19 infection related to in-person education were significantly lower than those in the surrounding community.” • The second study, printed in the September 2021 issue, was based on data from the 2020–21 school year. It showed that students can be transported on near-capacity buses without spreading Covid, using low-cost mitigation, such as universal masking and keeping windows partly open to improve ventilation. Students sat in assigned seats to enable contact tracing. Dr. Dana Ramirez, a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital of the King’s Daughters and the lead author on the study, also served on NA’s medical advisory team.

Headmaster Dennis Manning noted that “the broadest goal was to keep our students and faculty safe and to sustain in-person learning,” and the school’s approach proved successful.