Community School Case Study: Enrico Fermi School No. 17
A community school with a burgeoning garden program.
Interview With Caterina Leone
Senior Director of Staff & Educator Effectiveness
Office of Human Capital
Rochester City School District Central Office
I had the chance to speak with Caterina Leone of the Rochester City School District's Office of Human Capital about the community school model, and how it can support partnership with public gardens and adjacent institutions. As the former principal of Enrico Fermi School No. 17 who took the initiative in converting the school to a community school, Leone has a deep knowledge of and passion for this approach in education.
Topics we cover include:
The process for adopting the community school model
Forming a strategic plan using the Asset-Based Community Development toolkit
What the process looks like for community schools to partner with local organizations
The green partners with whom School 17 currently works
Key Takeaways
Adopting the Community School Model
When Caterina Leone became the principal of Enrico Fermi School No. 17, she was inheriting challenges with persistent violence, low academic performance, and broken community trust. To turn things around, Leone decided to adopt the community school model, redesigning the dual-language program to promote cross-cultural understanding and linguistic sharing in English and Spanish, and implementing an expanded learning system to create more space for inquiry-based learning.
Leone explains that as a school, it makes sense to be a central hub of access. You bring the services to the place people go everyday. It also creates a sense of “vicarious trust” — organizations who are affiliated with the school can inherit elements of the relationships and rapport a school has with its community, allowing for a “warm handoff.” This greatly enhances the potential for a successful connection with a given resource.
Forming a Strategic Plan
An important resource Leone used in her first year as principal was DePaul University’s Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) toolkit, which helps guide leaders as they investigate deficiencies and needs as well as assets and capacities in a community. It involves taking inventory of individuals,associations, institutions, physical spaces, systems of exchange, and cultures/stories/history, and understanding how they all fit together.
Process for Partnership
When formulating a partnership, Caterina looks for a “win-win” and complementary missions. Through partnership, a school should be better able to meet its needs and goals, and likewise for its partner. All parties should be wary of organizations engaging in mission creep, expanding the scope of their operations simply because grant funding is on the table or there are political incentives.
An example at the school: School 17 piloted a medicaid-billable satellite mental health clinic with Hillside, a health organization in Rochester. This made sense, because Hillside had child mental health services as an organizational priority, and their target demographic faced concrete barriers to accessing traditional clinics. At the same time, School 17 had many students who were in need of mental health services and socio-emotional support. So, the school opted to circumvent legislation to bring a clinic in-house. At the clinic level, this greatly reduces no-shows and increases productivity.
In Leone’s experience, sometimes a partnership finds you, and sometimes you have to go out and search for a relationship to develop and bring in. Many partnerships are established through word of mouth, or serendipitous connections.
Green Partners
To expand the school’s garden programming, School 17 has partnered with urban agriculture organizations Taproot Collective and Greentopia, as well as Cornell Cooperative Extension of Monroe County, Miracle Gro, Center for Youth, Common Ground Health, EatSmartNY, and the City of Rochester. The Seneca Park Zoo Society has also helped to establish gardens in the neighborhood.
Leone expressed that public gardens could help create the conditions for partnership by better advertising their educational objectives and capacities, and curricular materials they have developed. In Rochester, the Seneca Park Zoo has a “zoo-mobile” that goes out into the community and helps demonstrate their commitment to education. She says accessibility, marketing, and a clearly communicated educational focus are key for public gardens looking to partner with schools.
