Orange County Public Schools and the University of Central Florida received with the 2022 Dr. Shirley S. Schwartz Urban Education Impact Award for the Comprehensive Urban Teacher Pipeline Project during the 66th Annual Council of the Great City Schools Fall Conference.
The award honors an outstanding partnership between a university and an urban school district that has had a positive and significant impact on student learning.
The Comprehensive Urban Teacher Pipeline centers around the recruitment and retention of future teacher candidates and teachers in high-need Title I schools. The partnership for this project began in 2018 with the Teacher Quality Partnership, which then expanded with two additional programs; the OCPS/Lockheed Martin/UCF Academy for Mathematics and Science Tuition-free Master’s Program and the OCPS/UCF/Noyce STEM Tuition-free Doctoral Program.
“Since the inception of this partnership, the total elementary education internship placements increased 238 percent within its partner schools,” said B. Grant Hayes, Ph.D., UCF College of Community Innovation and Education. “This means that more teacher candidates are receiving broader internship experience through supportive teacher leaders in the urban school sites.”