History of the University Park Campus School
In 1996, after ten years of successful affordable-housing development through the Main South CDC, Clark and its neighbors were looking to do more to stabilize the population of the neighborhood. They chose education as one way to attract and retain families who would invest in the community.
At the same time, James Garvey, the Superintendent of the Worcester Public Schools, was concerned with the growing ninth-grade dropout rate in the city. The two institutions partnered to jointly start and govern a neighborhood-based, small, grade 7-12 secondary school with the explicit mission of preparing all students for college.
During the planning phase, Clark and the Worcester Public Schools convened a steering committee of four high-level decision makers from each institution. Regular meetings enabled on-the-spot decision making in the meetings and expedited the planning process, so the school could open as a fully-formed model.
With the support of a grant from the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development, Donna Rodrigues was selected by the Steering Committee to plan the school and open it in the fall of 1997. Donna was a 26-year veteran of the Worcester Public Schools who had taught in Clark’s teacher education program and had recently completed a mid-career master’s degree at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. She entered the planning process armed with the latest research on the then-novel idea of a small, personalized high school.
As she assembled her faculty, Donna recruited two other veteran teachers to join her at the school. June Eressy – now the principal – taught English and humanities, and Dermot Shea taught math and science. Hiring excellent, experienced teachers ensured that students would receive the high-quality instruction that they would need in order to catch up to grade level and that the graduate interns who would share teaching responsibility would have mentors who truly modeled best practices.
The school opened in space on the Clark campus in the fall of 1997, enrolling 35 seventh-grade students, with Donna as principal and these two teachers rounding out the faculty. Each teacher taught in three-hour blocks, with the principal teaching Spanish to allow for preparation periods. Two graduate interns from the University's Hiatt Center assisted.
As the school grew, adding one grade per year, it moved to a former elementary school building around the corner from the university. New teachers were hired – a mix of experienced veterans and recent Clark graduates, many of whom student taught at the school and learned the strategies used by teachers there.
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