The Community Partnership School at Howard Bishop Middle aims to help the school’s population so students can learn better.

When a student at Howard Bishop Middle School needs food, a change of clothes, an ear to listen to their troubles, they go to the Nest.

It’s the name of the Community Partnership School that resides in Howard Bishop Middle, a collaboration between the Children’s Home Society of Florida, the Alachua County Public Schools, the University of Florida, Santa Fe College and the county’s Health Department.

The Nest, named for the Howard Bishop Middle’s hawk mascot, aims to provide tangible and emotionally supportive services to the school’s community

“It’s a model that allows the teachers to teach,” said Jennifer Anchors, executive director of CHS in mid-Florida.

This is the second year of the Community Partnership School’s initiative at Howard Bishop. The school partners with the Bread of the Mighty food bank to provide snacks for hungry students and Gainesville Family Eye Care to provide eye exams for a couple of students each month.

“Students can focus on learning and they’re not in the clinic with a stomachache,” said Tarcha Rentz, director of the Community Partnership School.

Its clothing closet offers students the chance to change into different clothes if theirs gets torn, and this year it hired more mental health counselors for students to talk to. This month, it will start after-school tutoring to help students improve their Florida Standards Assessments scores.

Anchors said Howard Bishop, a school with 53 percent of students passing the English Language Arts assessments, had the criteria that would make a Community Partnership School successful.

“To make a CPS work, it really needs to be a school in a community type setting; it really needs to be a school that does have challenges, academic challenges or social challenges,” she said. “The number one thing is you really need a principal who has bought into this because you have strangers coming into the school.”

Enter Mike Gamble, principal of Howard Bishop Middle.

The program has started off small and slow, Gamble said, and he has the goal of helping one child at a time.

“I’m confident that it will pay off in the long run,” he said.

Howard Bishop is one of nine CHS community partnership schools across Florida. Most start small, Anchors said, and grow larger. Evans High School, in Orlando, started in 2012 and has seen SAT scores and graduation rates rise.

“You have to start super small because you need the funding to get bigger,” Anchors said.

Paula Fussell, who retired from UF as vice president of human resources last year, is an alumna of Howard Bishop, and she hopes other people who went to the school will donate time, money or ideas to the school.

“Gainesville is a very giving community, and I believe there’s a lot of opportunity in our alum to get involved with the community school,” Fussell said.

Gamble said the additional counselors have reduced Howard Bishop’s exclusionary disciplinary methods, like suspensions.

The Nest is designed to help students, parents and teachers by focusing on what the Howard Bishop population needs. It hopes to grow into a model that can provide parent support as well as focusing on the whole child.

“The community partnership school is for everyone in the school,” Rentz said.

Gamble said last year the school did an information blitz for sixth-graders, offering them the chance to get their seventh-grade required immunizations at the school. Only a few students took advantage of it.

“We’re not giving up,” Gamble said.

But there’s room for growing. The school’s memorandum of understanding is for 25 years.

“It’s a long-term commitment,” Gamble said.

Originally posted by: The Gainesville Sun