A Beautiful Thing: A Service Learning Partnership Develops

This roundtable presents multiple perspectives on a multi-year partnership between an urban school and its university neighbor. Building and nurturing a thriving mutually beneficial partnership between an urban Pre-K-8 school and its neighboring university is, as the principal of Cesar Batalla School often says, “a beautiful thing.” Cesar Batalla, serving 800 students and families from a multilingual, multiethnic community in a low-income neighborhood, is located a stone’s throw from a mid-sized suburban, private university that attracts undergraduate and graduate students with little personal firsthand experience with racial, ethnic and linguistic diversity, or of poverty and its challenges. “Geographical neighbors, yet worlds apart” would aptly describe the university school juxtaposition before we embarked upon our partnership. Transforming a coincidental proximity into a deep partnership has been a journey of many discoveries.