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Staffing and Support
Q: When you’re bringing on staff, do you look for people with the skills to work with outside organizations? Is there a difference in the kind of people you look for?
Yes, absolutely. I’m always looking for people who have outside partnership experiences or who have volunteer experiences, people who have worked with the Boy Scouts, with the Girl Scouts, people who worked at homeless shelters or at soup kitchens, or have done internships at nonprofits. I’m always looking for such people.
Q: Does the Department of Education provide support for your work with partners?
SHERMAN: Not at all. They envision the principal as the captain of the ship. I’m given great freedom to do what I want, as long as there are quantifiable student academic results. I’m given a budget to run a school that is not sufficient, so it’s really up to me, the captain of the ship, to pull in other resources that will help the ship to move forward. That’s where I bring in nonprofits and for-profits and different relationships that will help to make the school an exciting place.
Q: Does the support the partner provides change over time? Do they get more involved with the school and want to do other things?
SHERMAN: Ideally, yes, but I haven’t really seen that yet. Usually a partnership happens because of a specific need or a specific purpose the partner has. They get a grant to do X and, hopefully, over time, X, Y, and Z will happen, but very often, it’s tightly focused around X.
With iMentor, there are other possibilities that hopefully will happen, but largely they haven’t happened. The mentors have not gotten involved in our school. Other people from the organization have not gotten involved. It’s a very tightly focused purpose. It would be great if more people would be touched and if they started to remove some of the blinders that they wear and if they could see that we have this need and they could meet that need, but that hasn’t happened.
Most of the partnerships we have are tightly focused around one purpose. There isn’t a great deal of expandability into other purposes.
The Challenges of Deepening the Relationship
Q: Could you foresee a situation where the partner really got involved in the core curriculum of the school?
SHERMAN: We started the school with a partner, and the idea was that they would get involved in the core curriculum. In the first year, they made it very well known to us that they were not interested at all in getting involved in curriculum, that wasn’t their area of expertise, they didn’t feel comfortable, and they didn’t want to do it. But we would be open to a partner doing something like that. We’ve written grants with Queens College that would have moved us in that direction.
We were founded with that idea: that this was going to be a community-partnership school. But it really hasn’t happened like that. The community wants to make noise about certain things, and then once their needs are met, they step back and they don’t want to help too much, don’t want to really get involved in curriculum, and I think don’t want to get involved in accountability for curriculum or for outcomes.
People and organizations have very tight focuses and don’t want to move beyond those tight focuses, in general, from our experience. I’m always jealous of schools like the KIPP schools that get these deeper partnerships that affect the school, or so it seems from newspaper articles that I read.
Q: A lot of times the partners say the schools are not open to that kind of relationship and want to protect their prerogatives. But you seem open and willing to have them involved in that way.
SHERMAN: Yes, but it takes time. I don’t need anyone who’s going to come in and say, “Fix this,” and then step back and not do anything. I’m interested in someone who can say, “Let’s meet and talk about how we can fix it together,” or “How can we create this opportunity together? And we’re willing to look for resources to help support this.” That would be great. Sure.
