STAFF GUEST POST: The TRUE Meaning of Partnership – A Shining Example ✩

As you all know, one of our All-In Partnership Project! UE Program Goals for the 2019-2020 school year is #Together: We are embedded into school communities. This means that as partners with schools, we focus on adaptive integration to ensure coherent service delivery for students and efficient processes for staff, thus building trust, relationship, and TRUE partnership. As this goal is one of the pillars of our Unconditional Education Model, it is one that cannot be highlighted enough, and can be pretty easy to achieve 😊.
While reflecting on the meaning of TRUE Partnership, I immediately thought of our partnership with Verde Elementary School in West Contra Costa Unified School District. We are currently in our 4th year of partnership with Verde and it has been an inspiring journey to witness and be a part of. After starting out with just 1 UE Coach, our staff has grown to include 1 UE Coach, 1 Clinician, and 3 Student Support Assistants thanks to a truly blended funding model consisting of school site funds, district home office funds, Medi-Cal funds, and foundation grants. There are many things that made, and continues to make, this partnership so successful. I wanted to highlight a couple tips and share a shining example of a beautiful way the partnership was celebrated.

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Partnership Tips

Alignment and clear expectations

• When the partnership first started, we made sure there was an alignment of values and goals with the home office team and the school site administrators to ensure a strong connection on all levels. This is revisited formally twice a year to hammer out the details of partnership by defining the structure, outlining what the partnership should accomplish, and understanding what constitutes each partner’s domain to help eliminate confusion for both partners. 

Consider partners a part of the team

• One reason we stand out in the services we provide is evident in how we consider the schools we work with as partners and not just “contractors” coming in to provide a service. Instead we embed ourselves into the school communities we work with; we’re teammates! And, as with any good team, clear and well-defined roles should be established in effort to avoid possible confusion or misunderstandings. To make the partnership as valuable as it can be, it should be about learning, growing, benefiting from each other's knowledge and experience while also celebrating one another’s successes.

Give the partnership room to grow

• Remember, we’re not just pooling resources; we’re also combining our abilities to scale and create sustainable systems to build capacity of the other adults on campus. Flexibility and extensibility are key, as extensibility is a vital element in any partnership because both our collective ability to extend resources can mean freedom for staff to innovate new ideas and ways in which they can best support the staff, students and families we are privileged to serve.  A valuable partnership should be capable of sharing resources and adapting over time.

Make honesty and transparency your “watchwords”

• We were able to establish a successful partnership, ensuring it had the ability to grow through honesty and transparency about the services we could provide. That meant maintaining open and frequent communication as well as personal interaction as often as possible.

A Shining Partnership Example

​During a team meeting, the Verde team identified that although there had been much progress made, they were not sure the principal was seeing it and was feeling a bit “down”. We discussed how much progress had been made thus far, acknowledging that none of it would have been possible without the principal’s leadership and partnership and thought it would be a meaningful, powerful intervention to acknowledge how much we appreciate all of his efforts. As a team, we decided to honor the principal by naming October 17th “National Mr. AV Day”. With coordination from the UE Coach (Anna Scaiano), and support from the Verde Team (Kyle Sinkoff, Monse Vazquez, Abby Romero, and Terence Adams), the entire school community (staff and students) rallied behind this surprise day and showered the principal with cards, decorations, and small tokens of appreciation throughout the day, as a way to appreciate him. The Seneca team threw him a surprise party, decked out with food and decorations, where he was presented with a registered star named after him in his honor, which also was another example of partnership as the mascot of Verde are the Stars. This was a true example of partnership and #Together as everyone on campus worked together to make this happen!

A Huge SHOUT OUT to the Seneca Verde Team (Anna, Kyle, Abby, Monse, Terence, Laura, and Robyn) for your hard word, dedication, thought & commitment to making Verde & Seneca a beautiful Partnership!!!

Blog Post Written By: Amber Fretwell, Senior Director of School Partnerships