By Dr. Elena Olsen, Inspire Contributor

Since its founding, Eastside Preparatory School has had a strong sense of its identity as an independent school: its founders hired educators who wanted to develop and teach a rigorous, relevant curriculum that would evolve with the world. In the words of Director of Strategy, Technology, and Innovation Jonathan Briggs, Eastside Prep has always been “healthily wary of connecting itself with outside organizations.” Will these partnerships improve the ways we educate our students, or will they erode the experience? While retaining its autonomy, Eastside Prep has always sought deep, diverse, and ongoing connections to community and the wider world. And now, twenty-three years into its life, Eastside Prep is in a position to establish more robust partnerships with groups, communities, and organizations that will strengthen our programs and mission. With the stability and robustness of well-established programs and values, the school has the capacity to look outward in a way that did not exist ten years ago.

Intentional development of partnerships is crucial to Eastside Prep’s core values and the continued evolution of its academic programs. In her essay on A Lived Mission on our website, former Head of School Dr. Terry Macaluso writes about one of our Mission points, Responsible Action. Responsible action is ethical action, she explains, “action within the context of a community.” It is not an overstatement to say that every student and faculty member at EPS takes this Mission point to heart, daily demonstrating their awareness of the impact of their actions in our own community as well as communities beyond campus. Graduating students and alumni consistently credit their EPS education with developing their understanding of themselves as community members who seek to understand all perspectives within their community, to respect those perspectives as they offer their own, and to serve that community through their actions.

One distinguishing feature of Eastside Prep culture—across leadership, faculty, staff, students, and families—is the ongoing desire to evolve and innovate while also maintaining the programs and standards that we know serve students well. I had the opportunity to speak with some of the faculty and staff who are building new partnerships in order to address priorities identified in the 2023–2028 strategic plan. These initiatives charge the school to evolve programs based on educational research, innovative practices, and connections with local, national, and international communities. As Director of Student Well-Being Paul Hagen points out, education “needs to be tied to the wider world… students know when something they’re learning has real-world relevance versus seeming disconnected” from real-world issues. Eastside Prep is now at a point in its evolution in which it can develop and establish new ways of bringing the wider world onto campus and send students into the world as an integral part of their academic experience.

Head of School Sam Uzwack is excited to lead Eastside Prep into a new “connected” era. He envisions these partnerships on multiple levels and sees myriad ways in which they will enhance student learning. Uzwack has multifocal vision on most aspects of how the school functions, particularly when it comes to how Eastside Prep can be connected and contribute to the world beyond its campus. Speaking about what excites him most about this partnership expansion initiative, Uzwack specifies both the larger and the closer-to-home scope of these partnerships.

On the closer-to-home front, partnerships can be highly individualized—that is, as small as one between two people. Uzwack notes the importance of connecting students to those who can teach and mentor them, opening the doors of their world beyond EPS classrooms. “We want to have a network so that we can connect students to pursue whatever it is they are passionate about pursuing. If a student has an idea and needs a resource or connection, we know where they can go.” That network should consist of EPS parents and guardians as well as experts in the broader community—professionals in careers of interest, professors, community leaders.

Uzwack emphasizes the importance of relationship at the heart of Eastside Prep culture. He also emphasizes that it is crucial to remain rooted where we are. “I love the idea of taking care of what we have control over—which is our neighborhood.”

Restoring the section of Cochran Springs that runs through the EPS campus is one example of this valuable “hyperlocal connection.” This partnership originated in student-led projects, the Upper School Environmental Club’s salmon release project and Burton Barrager’s Environmental Practices 7 students’ study of our backyard ecosystem, and is now an ongoing official salmon-recovery restoration partnership with the City of Kirkland and King Conservation District. Last October, led by the Environmental Club, about eighty EPS students, parents, and staff removed invasive blackberry bushes in two sections of the creek, improving habitat and water quality to support salmon and orca health. This work had been a goal of EPS students and science faculty for many years and the specific partnership work began pre-COVID, so it has been immensely rewarding to take action and see significant progress. Hagen echoes Uzwack’s thoughts on the importance of hyperlocal partnerships, noting that it is important for students to ask themselves, “What’s happening in my neighborhood?” and then to get involved.

Eastside Prep faculty know that students need to see concrete connections in what they are learning to the world around them. Further, as Hagen and Uzwack express, students will develop deeper understanding of global issues and perspectives when they have direct experience in their own local communities and can connect that to a larger world context. Projects like Cochran Springs restoration and working with the City of Kirkland in being positively engaged neighbors for their next-door permanent supportive housing project need to develop alongside larger-scale partnerships. One goal that is very much on Uzwack’s mind is that of a partner school in a Spanish-speaking country. “We have been talking about this for a long, long time,” and now is the time to find the right fit. A long-term relationship with a school in a Spanish-speaking country will not only enhance student learning within the Spanish program, but also deepen students’ self-development and provide powerful new avenues for students in their development as culturally competent global citizens.

Likewise, the continuing evolution of Eastside Prep’s Education Beyond the Classroom (EBC) program is focused on strengthening its ties to global citizenship education and our academic curriculum. Every EBC program should be, in Hagen’s words, “deeply educational and transformational” in its intentional integration with what students are learning inside the classroom, opening students’ perspectives on that learning and helping them identify areas of interest and passion. This could happen through immersion in the Gullah-Geechee culture of the southeastern United States, learning about their contributions to American society and culture, or through seeing UN Sustainable Development Goals in action in Southern Thailand. The key to educational depth for these experiences is students and faculty identifying areas of interest and then being intentional about connecting them to learning goals, our Mission points, and self-development.

As part of the strategic initiatives over the next three years, Hagen’s goal is to build out the EPS service program so that it is an integral part of students’ education. Service programs in schools can be challenging to sustain in a meaningful way—when schools require “service hours,” students can begin to view serving their communities as just another box to check or a chore to get done. This is why Eastside Prep does not require service hours. Instead, as Hagen puts it, service should be something that “every student is engaged in over their years at EPS,” that is built on long-term relationships and partnerships with local communities and organizations and that ties into what students are learning in their classes.

Indeed, even as Eastside Prep seeks to forge partnerships and broaden our reach in the world, the outside world also permeates in ever-more diverse and urgent ways. Artificial Intelligence development is something that can feel intimidating for both teachers and students in its power to change or even harm student learning. Yet it is, in fact, a domain in which the EPS community can serve other learning communities as well as our own meaningfully and positively. How to empower rather than hamper student learning in an AI world has been an ongoing conversation and focus for our faculty over the last two years. Their efforts will be enhanced through partnering with other communities engaged in the same kind of work.

The University of Washington (UW) reached out to Eastside Prep earlier this year as they look into ways they can help guide AI to impact education positively. The UW AmplifyLearn.AI mission is to “harness the power of AI to amplify the quality and equity of student learning.” This National Science Foundation-funded project is primarily focused on creating teacher tools grounded in best practices from the UW School of Education and UW Computer Science. Their research team has a partner company, colleague.ai, that is turning this research into practical tools. According to Briggs, “This project is exciting to be a part of and it is still early stages.” Another AI-related partnership that EPS students have taken on is with EPS parent Eran Megiddo, whose AI-focused application, Maximal Learning, helps students organize their lives by building task lists and breaking large projects down into smaller steps, organizing in-school and extracurricular commitments, and offering tools for pursuing new projects and learning. Eastside Prep students are serving as beta testers for Maximal Learning. Briggs notes that this partnership “has taught our EPS Research & Design academic team about gathering user feedback, interface design, and testing assumptions.”

Innovating wisely involves understanding that innovations happen not in isolation but via partnerships and collaboration. Students who enroll in the University of Pennsylvania’s Social Innovators Program (schoolyardventures.com/eps) will not only build entrepreneurial skills in the social innovation domain, but will also connect with students and mentors across the country to share ideas and collaborate in making the world a better place through socially-connected business ventures.

The very word partnership centers on human relationship, and ultimately, that is the real benefit of all partnerships between Eastside Prep and other organizations. The dynamic exchange inherent in partnering with another group of thoughtful individuals came to life last September, when Eastside Prep hosted Klara Teoretiska Gymnasium School (Klara Theoretical Upper Secondary School) from Stockholm, Sweden. This partnership began with Klara reaching out to Eastside Prep, essentially asking for an exchange of ideas specifically centered on student well-being. Their visit prompted rich dialogue and exchange of resources, as Eastside Prep faculty and students talked with the visiting educators about being teenagers during a social-media-inundated era, about managing intense schedules inside and outside of school, and about issues teenagers around the globe are engaging with. Paul Hagen noted that he was particularly proud that the visiting Swedish counselor wanted extra time with our counseling team and expressed how impressed they were by our counselors’ efforts to support students.

Eastside Prep partnerships should always foster this kind of mutual inspiration. Just as the Eastside Prep Vision is to inspire students to create a better world, our work with partner organizations and in communities should inspire others to support us in that vision, as well as inspire Eastside Prep students and educators to new pathways in their work to make the world better. Paul Hagen noted that the Swedish school visit reminded him that teenagers and educators across the world are perhaps more alike than different:

“There is a global educator language, and we share a lot of the same concerns and passions. In a world that often feels increasingly disconnected and divided, maintaining human connection through a commitment to collective learning and growth is more important than ever.”