Partnership Development

Johnson Park Middle School-OSU Partnership

In the 2005-06 school year, Ohio State began to develop a partnership with Johnson Park Middle School (JPMS) in the Columbus City Schools. The P-12 Project coordinated the university-wide effort, which was intended to establish visible, consistent connections that benefit both JPMS and Ohio State. The OSU-JPMS Partnership was created to build college aspirations in the middle school population, create outreach opportunities for OSU students, and develop a model partnership between universities and middle schools.

Activities and projects were designed to increase JPMS student and parent awareness of opportunities for college attendance and to develop students’ academic skills, building on the Columbus City Schools College Prep 101 program and the Ohio Department of Education State Standards for sixth, seventh, and eighth grades. Partnership activities centered on opportunities for JPMS students to visit Ohio State and for Ohio State students to visit JPMS. Activities for parents and school staff included a JPMS staff visit to campus for a workshop on possibility of shared technology and a special evening program for parents on financing college.

Campus visits were designed to give the middle school students a sense of what it is like to be a student at OSU. This included:

Transportation via the Campus Area Bus Service (same buses students ride on campus)
During each visit, a presentation on financing college by the Office of Minority Affairs
Integrated walking tour of campus to areas frequented by most resident students
Gift bags with items donated by multiple departments and offices, providing a sampler of the academic programs and services available at Ohio State

For Ohio State students, the campus visits provided an opportunity to put academic learning into practice. Graduate and undergraduate students coordinated volunteer activities, developed and taught age-appropriate activities, and initiated mentoring relationships with JPMS students on writing projects.

The partnership was a massive undertaking, involving over 100 Ohio State faculty, staff, and students in providing programs for 190 JPMS students, 12 teachers and staff members, and 21 parents. The P-12 Project coordinated the efforts of more than 30 Ohio State colleges and offices: Athletic Department, Campus Area Bus Service (Transportation and Parking), College of Dentistry, College of Education and Human Ecology, College of Engineering, College of Humanities, College of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, College of Medicine, College of Pharmacy, College of the Arts, College of Veterinary Medicine, Cop-Ez, Council of Graduate Students, Digital Union, Facilities Operations and Development, Graduate Women’s Activity Committee, Media Relations, Multicultural Center, Office of International Education, Office of Minority Affairs, Office of the Chief Information Officer, Office of Student Life/Ohio Union, Recreation & Physical Activity Center, Research Foundation, School of Allied Medical Professions, Service-Learning Initiative, Society of Women Engineers, Todd A. Bell National Resource Center on the African American Male, Undergraduate Admissions & First-Year Experience, Wexner Center for the Arts, and WOSU@COSI.

The JPMS Partnership was profiled in the publication Success for All Students: JPMS story (PDF, 439 KB); full document (PDF, 4MB). The P-12 Project is distilling lessons learned from this and other partnership efforts into a model of school-university partnerships.

2005

The first tangible result of the partnership was a visit by 40 JPMS students with teachers and parent volunteers on October 18, 2005. Photos >

Students toured the Recreation and Physical Activities Center (RPAC), learning about the structural engineering of the facility.
Ohio State undergraduates in English 109 Writing Workshop met with JPMS students to begin a year-long mentor/partnership to write and publish an online magazine.
JPMS advanced math and science students participated in hands-on tours of the Digital Media Center in Hagerty Hall and the Digital Union.
Student volunteers from the Ohio State chapter of the Society of Women Engineers helped JPMS students build devices that keep eggs from breaking when dropped from a height of 6 feet. Then they took them out on the South Oval to test them. Writing responses integrated into engineering activities were aligned with Ohio’s standards for eighth-grade writing and were similar to short-answer responses on state- mandated standardized tests.

2006

On May 19, 2006, 80 students from Johnson Park participated in a campus visit centered on the School of Allied Medical Professions. Students were divided into three groups for three hour-long sessions. Each group rotated to presentations given by Ohio State allied medicine students and faculty on the professions of Medical Technology, Radiology and Respiratory Therapy, and Athletic Training. Each session included hands-on activities with medical equipment, giving students a taste of each specialization as a potential career. Between sessions two and three, a dietician gave a lunchtime talk and demonstration about diet and nutrition. Photos >

2007

The campus visit on January 18, 2007, was the most ambitious of the partnership, involving many departments across campus in the presentation of multifaceted activities for 80 middle schoolers. The JPMS students had a choice of three mini-programs in the morning:

College of Pharmacy students gave a presentation about the different kinds of diabetes, how to recognize common symptoms of the disease, and how to avoid becoming diabetic; they also described careers in pharmacy. Their presentation is part of the Academy of Student Pharmacists’ ongoing Operation Diabetes Education.
JPMS students were given “passports” to the world of Spanish language and culture in the College of Humanities’ World Media and Culture Center, Center for Latin American Studies, and Center for Teaching and Learning. The passports contained key questions they found answers to as they visited each center to have their passports stamped, exposing them to the support services available for language students at Ohio State.
At the Museum of Classical Archaeology in the College of Humanities, students handled ancient shards of pottery and then learned to reconstruct modern pieces of pottery from items that were broken for this purpose.

In the afternoon, 15 JPMS students attended an orientation workshop on digital media at the Digital Union. These students, five each from the sixth, seventh, and eighth grades, were selected to participate in a unique after-school program, funded by an Ohio Learning Network (OLN) Learning Communities Initiative grant awarded to the P-12 Project. Following the January visit, the middle school students continued to meet at the Digital Union to create their own digital masterpieces, with the assistance of four Middle Childhood Education undergraduate students who had been trained in digital media. The i-movies, audio essays, and other projects created by the middle schoolers were displayed at WOSU@COSI on June 3, 2007.

Also with the support of the OLN grant, two JPMS Language Arts seventh-grade classes continued work on the M-Magazine, a special publication written by middle schools students about middle school. This was the second year for this project, in which English 109 students served as editors for the seventh graders. The classroom cooperative published M Magazine at the end of spring quarter.

Sixth graders who were not involved in the Digital Union After-School Program or the M-magazine were treated to a rehearsal of Dance Downtown by Ohio State’s Dance Department. They also got a backstage look at the production aspects of a dance performance.

Photos >