Madison Metropolitan School District Engagement Team: Helping Make School Partnerships Effective for All (Fifth in a Series)
Laura Whitmore taught in Poland through the Peace Corps and did community engagement work with the Madison Parks Department before joining MMSD.
By Jonathan Gramling
In the abstract, it seems like such a simple thing: engage Madison area citizens in working with Madison public school students to enhance their skills and assets. But in reality, there are over 25,000 students being taught daily in 52 schools. And there are 5,650 people in the Madison Metropolitan School District’s volunteer database. It’s like a small city that involves an incredible amount of coordination and certification in order for everyone to be effective and safe.
At the hub of a lot of this activity is Laura Whitmore, the coordinator of Community Partnerships. She comes well-prepared for the job beginning with her degree from UW-Madison.
“I served in the Peace Corps,” Whitmore said about her time after graduation. “I say that because I also served as a teacher, a high school teacher in a small coal-mining village in Poland. When I came back from that experience, I continued my public service career by working for the Madison Parks Division. I worked there for almost 19 years. I served as the volunteer administrator. Typically with a lot of jobs in that realm, you start to shift over to community outreach and community relations, which is what my job ended up doing. I also put on programs and created events. Eventually I also served as the public information officer for the Madison Parks Division. I then transitioned over to a position here at MMSD. It’s oddly similar because I work very much with the community. The community members that I worked with when I worked with the city are the same people.”
To coordinate partnerships that involve districtwide efforts require a lot of organization. And so when Whitmore arrived at MMSD, she set up a computerized volunteer database that not only ensured that the proper background checks and certification of volunteers happened and laws regarding student confidentiality were followed, but also allowed individual schools to tap into the volunteer pool without a lot of hoops.
Whitmore is in charge of the larger community partnerships that the district has with organizations like United Way, the Urban League of Greater Madison and Centro Hispano.
“Partnership is a term that should be used in a really intentional way because it has an intentional purpose,” Whitmore said. “It’s usually time-bound. They are usually built around programs. That’s the work that I live in right now. In that respect, in order to be effective in bringing community into our schools.”
And these partnerships involve organizations that bring purpose and resources to the partnerships.
“I work with Schools of Hope, both elementary and middle school,” Whitmore said. “I work with Achievement Connections. I work with the Urban League with the Middle Schools of Hope. We also have a partnership with Centro Hispano that also supports students more in an afterschool timeline. I work with the Dane County Retired Senior Volunteer Program. I work with some very specific partnerships. I don’t work with all partnerships. And no, I don’t establish them. Our office is generally not the office that would establish a partnership. That is done by other staff whose work is deeply connected to the purpose of that partnership. So they are developing it. We’re ensuring that the paperwork, all of the compliance pieces are being done.”
At the heart of the partnerships that Whitmore works with are members of AmeriCorps who allow the partnerships to have a full-time worker within each partnership school who not only provides some tutoring, but also coordinate the efforts of volunteers who come to the schools throughout the school day. In a tight labor market, it has been difficult to employ all of the AmeriCorps members who are central to these efforts.
“We need more AmeriCorps members,” Whitmore emphasized. “We need more people signing up to become an AmeriCorps member because then our partnerships can flourish even more. We have Elementary Schools of Hope and Achievement Connections, which are AmeriCorps programs. There is also a middle school one through Dane County. I am less involved with that one. That is also an AmeriCorps program. They also place AmeriCorps members in our schools. Yes, it has become a tremendous challenge to find enough people who either know about it or view it as a way to go to college or know they could do it and then give the college benefit to their grandkid.”
While the national AmeriCorps program was established to allow existing and future students to make a positive impact in their communities, the members also receive a benefit. According to Whitmore, AmeriCorps members enjoy meaningful, impactful service in the community, earn money for college or trade school, receive a living allowance and professional development, and receive health insurance if they choose to be a full-time member.
And the AmeriCorps members make a meaningful impact on the academic trajectory of many MMSD students.
“Achievement Connections is an amazing partnership with the United Way,” Whitmore said. “It’s an AmeriCorps-supported program with an AmeriCorps grant. The purpose of that partnership program is to provide tutoring in algebra and geometry to 9th and 10th graders because when this was established 6-7 years ago, those were traditionally classes that were failed the most. In order to boost graduation rate four years later, we were honing in on 9th grade algebra.”
And with the Urban League’s Middle Schools of Hope program, they bring needed support and guidance to middle school students at a stage in their academic careers where some begin to tune out. And over time, the Urban League has developed its own capacity.
“Very often, the partners bring their own resources,” Whitmore said. “And that is part of the partnership process, figuring out what is it that MMSD can provide. It may be space. It might be additional resources. It varies from partnership to partnership in what the needs are. That’s actually the work of my office in general, figuring out those logistical pieces. It’s not happenstance and not every school needs to figure it out on their own. We do this on a districtwide level so that schools can utilize it. Some schools have their own partnerships with other groups and I would rarely get involved in those because they are very specific to one school. But when they are broad in scope and involve multiple schools, sometimes hundreds and thousands of students, that is where a memorandum of agreement and all of these discussions with the partner come into play.”
There are other limited-scope partnerships that Whitmore rarely gets involved with. These are facilitated by the Madison Public Schools Foundation’s Adopt-a-School program.
“Individual companies work with an individual school to meet that individual school’s needs,” Whitmore said. “Not every partnership is set up as a volunteer experience, which is actually a very, very good thing because sometimes there just isn’t physical space nor is there time in a student’s day — especially when they are in elementary school — for tutoring. It often needs to happen during the literacy block. You can’t physically fit 10 more people into that classroom. Some Adopt a School Partnerships are set up for afterschool activities or support the PTO or provide financial support to the school. But when the Adopt a School Partnership may have a lot of basis around members of that organization, company or faith-based organization want to also volunteer their time in the school, it is best that it is done in alignment with another partnership that is actually designed to accommodate community volunteers.”
But that doesn’t mean that the community partnerships that Whitmore coordinates might not tap into these existing programs.
“Where I would have the overlay might be where if Elementary Schools of Hope is one of the partnerships and they could use more community volunteers, then we would tap into their Adopt a School partner,” Whitmore said. “Perhaps they would like to know how their individual members could help with this other partnership and how they could volunteer their time.”
With over 25,000 students, many of whom need extra assistance to bring out their talents and skills, MMSD needs the community to be engaged in working with the schools and students beginning with the AmeriCorps members who are key to the effective use of volunteer tutors in each school. The impact of these community partnerships impact the Madison area’s future quality of life for all citizens.
For more information about community partnerships and getting involved as an AmeriCorps member, email Laura Whitmore at lwhitmore@madison.k12.wi.us.
