When Karlee Kaminski (’25) began her first year of teaching at Pond Gap Elementary School this fall, it wasn’t the first time the new graduate had stood in front of a classroom or considered how to help her students outside of it.
For three years, Kaminski served on a research team for UT’s University-Assisted Community Schools initiative, learning how much of an impact community partnerships can have for young students.
Casey Olmstead, community school coordinator at Sunbright School, reads to children at Deer Creek Library.
“I always wanted to be a teacher,” says Kaminski. “Working with UACS in schools where students may have grown up differently than I have has given me more background on how to be able to support my students.”
Community schools provide resources to their students as well as students’ families and community members. From health care to hygiene products, language assistance and adult education, the schools integrate into their surroundings, collaborating with parents, teachers, and local leaders to support student well-being and development. To evaluate the program’s effectiveness, Kaminski’s research team conducted a survey of key stakeholders.
Last year the research team asked students at some UACS schools to participate in a Photo Voice survey, for which they took a picture of something in their school and described how the picture embodied what UACS means to them.
One young girl took a picture of a cherry blossom tree they had planted with its bunches of pink blossoms. She captioned it ‘Not a single flower.’
“She talked about how within their after-school program, she felt like she wasn’t alone,” Kaminski says. “She felt supported by her teachers and staff, by her community, her family, and her fellow students.”
And that is one of the main goals of the UACS initiative.
UT launched University-Assisted Community Schools in Knox County in 1998 as an after-school program. Over the following 20 years, it expanded to 17 sites across Knox County. Today there are 103 community schools that benefit in some way from UT’s Boyd Center for Community Schools, which offers the program’s professional development, technical assistance, and regional support.
“All community schools are comprehensive neighborhood centers built on partnerships that educate, engage, and activate to serve students, their families, and other members of the community,” says Janine Al- Aseer, director and clinical faculty of the Boyd Center for Community Schools. “However, university-assisted community schools are also able to leverage the academic, human, and material resources provided by an anchor institution. For Tennessee, that
anchor institution is UT’s Boyd Center for Community Schools.”
In 2024, the Boyd Center opened its doors in the College of Education, Health, and Human Sciences with the goal of developing a replicable model of university-assisted community schools that could be implemented across the state and the region. Al-Aseer notes that the center was developed in response to the state-wide need for educational support and services.
“The mission of UACS is to expand not only to our entire state but our entire region, our entire country, because we truly believe that that is what is in the best interest of our students and our stakeholders,” says Megan Mundie, a graduate teaching assistant. “There are states that don’t implement this or haven’t heard about it, but there is so much research-based evidence of how that’s improving academic success for students.”
With schools spanning the state, needs vary from program to program, resulting in a network of community partnerships and collaboration.
“Each school is different,” Mundie says. “The services are different because it’s all based on the needs there. What you might have as a need in Morgan County might be different from a need in Knox County, and that varies even from schools within those counties.”
Karlee Kaminski (’25) works with a student at Sunbright School in Morgan County.
At Sunbright School in Morgan County, UT student Allyssa Boring used her fluency in Spanish to facilitate a Spanish class alongside a remote teacher at another school.
“They don’t have a teacher on campus. They just have somebody at Coalfield, which is about half an hour away, who would teach through Zoom while teaching an in-person class,” Boring explains. “I’m a little closer to the students’ age, so I could establish a rapport with them and help with questions because it’s hard to hear from a different place over Zoom.”
Casey Olmstead, the community school coordinator at Sunbright School, wears many hats to meet the needs of students and families in Morgan County. She helps parents fill out paperwork for TennCare coverage, transports kids to dental appointments, coordinates food drives for long school breaks, and even brings Santa Claus to town in the winter.
“That might not be a need, but it was something when I was growing up. You want to provide that sense of normalcy,” says Olmstead.
To implement the University-Assisted Community Schools model in more communities around Tennessee, the Boyd Center is working to provide technical assistance, leverage partnerships, and conduct research and evaluations that demonstrate the impact community schools are having on rural communities and their students.
“This strategy of community schools really brings our Volunteer spirit to life,” says Mundie. “We are making that connection between the schools and the broader community. This is a really tangible way that UT’s land-grant mission is applied not only at the local level but across the state as well.”
(Top photo) UT student Allyssa Boring working with elementary students from Sunbright School in Morgan County.