This project team continued to develop a community-university partnership, begun in a 2013-2014 Bass Connections project team, with Vance County.

Vance County is located 45 minutes from Duke and is struggling with the highest school dropout rate in the state. The partnership is focused on incubating and developing a scalable intervention that will result in measurable improvements in the dropout rate in Vance County.

The team completed a second full iteration of the partnership model, using a classroom-based leadership intervention designed by Trent Swart and revised and implemented by the other team members. The team obtained enough qualitative and quantitative outcome data by the end of the academic year to evaluate proof-of-concept as well as feasibility for the new intervention. Project findings were presented at an international conference in January 2015. A pilot test of the community-college-course intervention was scheduled for 2016.

Timing

2014-2015

Team Outcomes

Ann B. Brewster, Paul Pisani, Max Ramseyer, Jack Wise. 2016. Building a University-Community Partnership to Promote High School Graduation and Beyond: An Innovative Undergraduate Team Approach. Journal of Applied Research in Higher Education 8(1):44-58.

Second iteration of partnership model using a classroom-based leadership intervention

Evaluation of proof-of-concept and feasibility for the new intervention

Conference presentation

This project team was originally part of the Education & Human Development theme of Bass Connections, which ended in 2022. See related teams, School Dropout, Disconnected Youth and the Middle Years (2013-2014) and Disconnected Youth and School Dropout Prevention (2016-2017).