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Community Partners
VUE Number 7, Spring 2005
An interview with Elana Karopkin  Audio Clip 2
Elana Karopkin is principal of the Urban Assembly School for Law and Justice in Brooklyn, New York.
What are the challenges you face as a principal in developing and sustaining partnerships?
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TEXT VERSION:
The main challenge is just how much work it is actually to find them, cultivate them, and maintain them. There are tremendous rewards, but with tremendous rewards there is a tremendous amount of work.
We are very fortunate at SLJ to be an Urban Assembly school. The Urban Assembly is an organization that sees bringing partnerships into schools as one its main mission points. It takes care of a good deal of that for us, or on our behalf. It identifies partnerships with organizations that they think would be a good match for us because of our theme or because of some of the programs that we're doing or have interest in doing. They help to establish them. And then as far as the cultivation and maintenance of them, the Urban Assembly appoints a full-time staff member to each one of its schools, called a partnership coordinator. That person's full-time job is to cultivate these partnerships, through e-mail, through a newsletter, through all kinds of things that get and keep outside people and organizations involved and invested in the school.
But I do think it's replicable even without a person in that particular role. What becomes essential –which is essential in our school anyway but even more essential in a school that doesn't have a full-time devoted person–is that these partnerships don't seem like add-ons, they don't feel like extras, things that can be tossed aside if it's too much work, or it's a busy month, or finals are coming due, or grades are supposed to be submitted. These have to be something that are absolutely part of the day-to-day fabric of the school's life. It couldn't be Thursday without Direct Focus and Michael Myers the photographer coming to SLJ. Those things are true. It couldn't be a Friday if we weren't going to meet our mentors from Brooklyn Law School. If those things weren't the case, it would be very easy for me to see how this could fall by the wayside.
Time is the most precious variable in any school community, so really figuring out how to utilize the structures that already exist in terms of making these partnerships is essential. Figuring out a way to marry the goals of the curriculum, whether that's in an advisory program or in an academic class, with the goals of the partners that you find. So it's not competing for time but rather utilizing the time that you have even better than the school could on its own.
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