Welcome to the Office of School Partnerships

The vision for The University of Alabama’s College of Education Office of School Partnerships is a collaborative network of partners that exist to promote innovation in area schools. Our partners include Tuscaloosa City Schools, Tuscaloosa County Schools, the UA / UWA Regional In-Service Center, AdvancEd and other various community partners. Our office fosters partnerships by building upon the service and outreach mission of the College of Education at The University of Alabama. One of our recent collaborations is an emergent education partnership with the Tuscaloosa City Schools and the Tuscaloosa County Schools, including a strategic plan developed in 2018.
What Participating Faculty Are Saying
“The parents love the opportunity to send their child to something in the summer. The kids really look forward to every year they get to intermingle with other high achieving students from all different areas, not just from their school. They make a lot of friends with people in other areas, people from other types of schools.”
Sharron Maughn “There's a teacher shortage right now.And I wonder how much of that is, the structure of the school environment and the ability of the teachers to help, kind of maintain their health throughout the workday. I think that plays a major role in teacher retention. If we can find compelling evidence from this study, and not only apply to a larger grant to do a larger scale, study and do hopefully some sort of intervention, that's data we can take to the state and from the state, that's one of those things where hopefully, we could get something changed. The overall goal of this study is to make some sort of long-lasting impact that can change the entire school environment for teachers for the better environment of teachers.”
Lee Winchester “I believe that the major thing is, students are in a low-income district, and kids struggle. The whole idea was to get the kids excited about reading. And because if you don't learn how to read, you can't learn anything.”
Dr. Michael Baptiste |
“As this work continues, the team ofTuscaloosa city schools will be equipped with more confidence and more experience in terms of designing and rolling out professional development for the teachers in the future, even without our help. We are trying to provide the expertise and the research perspective into the table, and justt o have them to equip them with the capability to roll out further.”
Feiya Luo “I like to see schools and districts implement and try new things and trust us and come to us with implementation issues so that we can problem-solve. And even though we do a lot of the same work across the whole state, it ends up looking different and should look different school by school, because they all have different needs. And we really like being able to meet their needs and get to know them so that we can know better what they need, and then tailor or adjust what their intervention looks like.“
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“I think the kids enjoyed seeing the college students, and they were elementary school kids. But I think it was just fun for them to have someone new in the classroom. We had a very nice experience with the school, and they seem to really appreciate that and feel good about being part of the program.”
Millie Dawson-Hardy
Millie Dawson-Hardy