University Of Cincinnati And Cincinnati Public Schools Work Together To Create Something Special For Clifton School

Press release from Cincinnati Public Schools:

June 1, 2020

A high-pitched chorus of excited greetings reverberates through the kindergarten classroom as the older, wiser teaching interns walk through the door. The children gather in a semicircle around the University of Cincinnati pair as they begin the children’s 10th and final Spanish lesson of the semester with an earworm of a welcome song, "Hola Hola."

UC graduate teaching interns Abbie Finnegan and Andie Anderson speak to the students exclusively in Spanish, and the students, a class in the newly established Clifton Area Neighborhood School (CANS), are already able to respond in kind.

"It's pretty cool to see how differently they learn versus how we learned Spanish as adults because kids’ brains are pretty incredible,” says Anderson. “They’re speaking so much Spanish after ten 30-minute lessons compared to what I spoke after my first five hours of Spanish classes, which was significantly less."

There's nothing unusual about education students doing their practicum work at public grade schools, but Finnegan and Anderson are pursuing master's degrees in Spanish with a focus on pedagogy — grad students who typically teach undergrads. UC has faculty and students from three of its colleges regularly visiting and working with CANS students, and more opportunities for partnerships are being explored.

"We're providing the Spanish lessons, but we also have the opportunity to work with this wonderful population of students that we just don't have at UC," says Kara Moranski, UC assistant professor of Spanish. "We could never offer this opportunity to any of our grad students without this partnership."

A New Vision

The Clifton School, located less than two miles from UC’s main campus, had served the neighborhood as its primary school since 1906. But facing a contracting student population and a budget crisis, Cincinnati Public Schools (CPS) was forced to close several neighborhood schools in 2002, the Clifton School among them. Those students were reassigned to other CPS schools.

By the time Angela Potochnik and her family moved to the Clifton neighborhood in late 2015, the conversation among residents to bring a neighborhood school back to the Cincinnati neighborhood was already well underway. Potochnik, a UC associate professor of philosophy and a mother, found herself drawn to the tight-knit community of residents and parents.

"It was a truly bottom-up effort," Potochnik says. "We were just community members who met every other week at a kitchen table in the neighborhood and talked about every aspect of getting a school up and running and plugged into the community."

Full story and photos at UC Magazine.

This press release was produced by Cincinnati Public Schools. The views expressed here are the author’s own.