01:00 AM EST on Sunday, March 12, 2006

Unassumingly, in the midst of a distressed, high-poverty neighborhood, an ancient elementary school building now houses a nigh-miraculous seventh- to twelfth-grade school.

Every member of its three graduating classes so far has passed the MCAS -- the Massachusetts state exam -- and gone on to college, and been the first member in their extended family to do so. The only schools with higher scores are three highly selective, entrance-exam schools, including Boston Latin, which scored only one point higher on the math. The only entrance criteria to this funky elementary-school building is that the kid lives in the neighborhood.

Indeed, Worcester's University Park Campus School is the only high school in the nation that is having this level of success with this demographic.

University Park Campus School is very much the product of a tight partnership between Main South, the immediate neighborhood, and Clark University. Once proudly working class, Main South had long been losing its lifeblood with the decline of Worcester's once-robust manufacturing economy. Clark, on the other hand, is a leafy, venerable-brick-building sort of New England campus, right in the middle of Main South. Frequently, in such partnerships, the institution acts like the paternalistic 800-pound gorilla, controlling the purse strings and decision-making for the good of the unwashed. Clark, to its credit, has tried to be wind in the neighborhood's sails.

Jack Foley, now Clark's vice president for government and community affairs, was involved in forming this partnership when the first conversations with the neighborhood started. "Clark realized back then that the university's success and future were inextricably linked with the neighborhood. If we didn't help it to improve, we'd be an island within it. Could we still attract students? As it was, town-gown tensions were intense. We considered helping the neighborhood to be enlightened self-interest.

"So in 1984 and '85, we started a dialogue over breakfast meetings with 'neighborhood leaders,' most of whom were self-proclaimed, but we worked with whoever was willing. The initial conversations were mainly about noise and parking. So OK, we tried especially hard the first year to be responsive. We built a new garage and told first-year students they could not bring cars to campus, which got a lot of cars off the streets. On Friday and Saturday nights, a Worcester cop patrolled the neighborhood with a Clark cop. We built a new dorm because our students were pushing the neighbors out the door. You have to show the partners that you're serious. We also started an annual picnic in June -- free burgers and dogs -- a come-to-the-campus event thrown by Clark's president and his wife. We gave tours of the campus to people who had lived here for generations, but never been to Clark."

The university and neighborhood worked together on a joint vision that led to forming Main South's Community Development Corporation -- CDCs were a new concept in the late 1980s -- on whose board Clark has one seat. They hired its first and only director, Steve Teasdale, set him up in an empty storefront and got to work.

By 1994, the CDC had rehabilitated more than 100 housing units, but the board felt the decline was continuing. They drafted a new, much more comprehensive strategic plan that included economic development, public safety, and social and recreational facilities. In response to the last, Clark started a summer camp for neighborhood kids, which not only gives the kids breakfast, lunch, academics, sports, crafts and the like, but introduces them to the concept of college.

Clark was especially intrigued by the new plan's focus on education. The neighborhood wanted an educational opportunity that was so good, people would actually choose to move there. In 1995, HUD awarded them a whopping grant, enough to create the school.

Clark's then-president Richard Traina got together with then-superintendent of the Worcester schools, James Garvey, to design what would be a new public school. The super had two issues. First, the city's high-school dropout rate was through the roof and he wanted innovative, alternative schools to stem it. Second, he needed to prove that regular district schools could be so flexible and creative, they could compete successfully with the then-growing number of charters. University Park Campus School is a public alternative school with both freedom and support from the district.

Simultaneously developing at Clark was the Hiatt Center for Urban Education, a teacher-preparation program dedicated specifically to preparing teachers for success with just the sorts of students who come from neighborhoods such as Main South. Hiatt students learn and discuss education theories and philosophies in their classes, and then go to University Park to see those ideas in practice, with real kids in real classrooms. Teachers are on Hiatt's clinical faculty. From five to seven Hiatt master's candidates do their student teaching at University Park, so when a vacancy at the school occurs, they've already auditioned some terrific teachers

Most impressively, Hiatt has curriculum-alignment teams in each discipline -- with University Park teachers on each team -- constantly looking at data, student work and classroom practices to improve K-16 curriculum alignment and the teaching techniques necessary to prepare all kids to be ready for college and able to succeed. Almost all juniors and seniors take at least one college course at Clark, so these teams have very specific examples of how the preparation is faring.

Today the Clark students cross Main Street to student-teach at University Park, or do research, observations, projects or work-study jobs. University Park students cross the opposite way to use Clark's auditorium, gym, go to plays, hear speakers, take courses, use science and computer labs, have dances, perform in the coffee house and so forth. College, as it were, is in their face as early as the little-kid summer camp, and then constantly from seventh grade on. It's real. It's right there. You can do it.

Clark gives free tuition to any student who meets its entrance criteria and has lived in Main South for at least five years. Five member of each University Park graduating class are at Clark now under this arrangement.

Imagine if Rhode Island Hospital took a nearby public school under its wing like this, working with the teachers to articulate their workforce and training needs, while putting their own experts in the school and bringing the kids to their world for hands-on, real life learning. Imagine Amgen or other big businesses -- and absolutely all the colleges -- partnering similarly, with "enlightened self-interest" such as Clark's. Such alliances would tear down the fortress walls of the public schools and bring more adult attention to the kids, and kid-energy to the workplace adults.

Rhode Island would be a different, better place.

Next week we'll get inside University Park Campus School itself.

Julia Steiny is a former member of the Providence School Board; she consults and writes for a number of education, government and private enterprises. She welcomes your questions and comments on education. She can be reached by e-mail at juliasteiny@cox.net or c/o The Providence Journal, 75 Fountain St., Providence, R.I. 02902.