The School of Education is playing a leading role in helping create Chapel Hill's newest middle school.
The new school, set to open in 2001, will be built on 44 acres of University-owned land adjacent to the Horace Williams tract, a parcel in northern Chapel Hill/Carrboro also owned by Carolina. The University is leasing the land to the Chapel Hill-Carrboro school system for $1 a year for 30 years.
Both the University and the school system expect this partnership to be about a lot more than inexpensive land.
The School of Education plans to be a thoroughly involved partner by helping the Chapel Hill-Carrboro school system design both the building and the programs at the new middle school.
In addition, students at the School of Education will practice their newly honed teaching skills at the school. And because the middle school will be located between Chapel Hill High and Seawell Elementary schools, the University's influence should spread to those schools as well, said Madeleine Grumet, dean of the School of Education.
In return, the Chapel Hill-Carrboro school system will have the resources and knowledge of the School of Education working to make the three schools even better, Grumet said.
"Schools need to be lively places," Grumet said. "For years we created schools as refuges from the world. That retreating can turn a school into a very dull place for teachers and students.
"Collaboration with this University can only animate the life of the school and the people in it," she added.
The partnership between the University and the local school system came about as the Chapel Hill-Carrboro schools worked to find land to build a needed middle school.
Grumet, who arrived as the new dean in July, was an immediate supporter of such a partnership. She has experience in similar partnerships, having helped start the New Visions School in New York while dean of the Brooklyn College School of Education. That school included partnerships with the Brooklyn Museum, the Brooklyn Public Library and the Brooklyn Center for Urban Environment.
While the partnership in Chapel Hill differs from Brooklyn, Grumet said both efforts involve improving education by breaking down isolation of schools from resources in the community.
In the case of Chapel Hill/Carrboro, the new middle school will have the faculty and students from the School of Education to help improve all aspects from the curriculum to teaching techniques to research projects.
And the improved learning environment cuts both ways, Grumet said, meaning that University faculty and students will be learning as well as teaching.
"I think if we succeed the school will look like a place where not just the children are learning, but the adults are learning as well," she said. "And we also get to learn by having people from the public schools in Peabody."
The new school has dedicated 2,000 square feet of space to be used as a center for teaching by the School of Education. Grumet hopes to raise enough money to expand that space.
That center will help the School of Education's programs for professional teachers getting post-graduate degrees in that these teachers won't have to fight for parking spaces on the main campus.
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