ANN ARBOR—Thirteen outreach and community service projects that will positively affect the lives of Michigan residents and offer opportunities for University of Michigan students and faculty to serve the state’s citizens have received funding from the University. The money comes from a one-time appropriation awarded to each state-assisted university by the Michigan legislature earlier this year.

“We assured legislators last spring that we would use the funds to support community outreach and other programs of service to the state and its citizens,” says Walter Harrison, U-M vice president for university relations. “We are very appreciative of the state’s support; these projects reflect a return on investment in many corners of the state.”

According to U-M Provost J. Bernard Machen, “we looked for evidence that students were involved in a substantive way, and for evidence that the projects would be continued once funding from the state had been expended. These proposals are extremely strong in both respects. And while some submissions were not funded because they did not involve students centrally, they would have a considerable impact on the state, so we want to be able to consider the possibility of returning to them in a second round.”

The funded proposals:

Michigan Math Camp will bring up to 200 Michigan high school math students and teachers to the University for intensive two-week summer math enrichment workshops, to be followed by correspondence between U-M undergraduate and graduate math students and the high school alumni, whose math interests will determine the content. The follow-up will help improve math curricula in the high schools. U-M math faculty will pair one-to- one with the high school teachers and the department will create a Web site for participants.

The Detroit Initiative expands a Department of Psychology community service learning project whose major goals include offering the expertise of psychology faculty to six community organizations associated with the Michigan Neighborhood Partnership in Detroit; broadening departmental ties with human service agencies beyond those in Washtenaw County and developing such ties with the Detroit community; providing a hands-on service and research practicum for undergraduates learning about the needs of urban children, youth and families through formal course work in community psychology, and teaching community intervention methods.

The U-M Law School will use its grant to help establish the Poverty Law Program. The Program will provide training, research support and technological resources to 12 legal services field offices throughout the state, serving every county in Michigan. The field offices provide direct legal representation in the areas of family, housing and public benefits law to low-income clients.

As a resource for the legal services field offices, the new Program would provide training to approximately 100 legal services attorneys, publish legal updates, schedule and facilitate meetings of statewide legal services task forces, and provide technological hardware and software to the offices and provide computer training.

Project Outreach, a 30-year-old community service program, places undergraduates in 57 agencies in Washtenaw County. Its goals are to help students apply their psychological knowledge in human service agencies serving children, youth and adults; to integrate community service with academic learning through connections between field work and classroom; and to explore careers in human services.

With each undergraduate contributing three hours of community service per week, the community is receiving approximately 2,000 hours of direct assistance. The grant will be used to expand the program to include spring and summer enrollment, to enroll more students throughout the year and to develop evaluation research internships.

Since 1988, the Dance Department‘s Detroit Outreach Project sends faculty and graduates into Detroit high schools for eight weeks of work with advanced high school dance students to teach sessions on technique, composition and history. Later in the year, students and their parents come to Ann Arbor for Dance Day to meet with U-M admissions officers, tour campus and attend undergraduate dance performances. The program also addresses needs of Hispanic students with a series of Detroit workshops demonstrating Latin American dance traditions.

Another component of the dance program is the Youth Intervention Project. Biza Sompa, a former soloist with the Congolese National Dance Company, has been teaching a weekly class on Congolese dancing and drumming to sixth-eighth grade boys from Jackson and Remus Robinson middle schools in Detroit. The youngsters, many with severe behavioral problems, have been identified as at-risk. The dance department, in consultation with Detroit public school administrators, teachers and parents, decided to use the class as a model for what can be accomplished in youth intervention. Students were permitted to participate in Sompa’s class only if they agreed to maintain classroom behavior and attendance in their regular school activities. The carry- over to the classroom was so dramatic that teachers and parents have said they they’d never seen such attention and discipline from these particular students.

The Center for Learning Through Community Service Alternative Breaks will expand its Alternative Breaks program, one of the most popular service learning programs at the University and one of the largest in the country. Participants volunteer for spring, summer and weekend projects. The weekend program allows students to address community issues by living and learning with residents in Flint, Detroit and neighboring cities over a series of weekends. The grant will allow for expansion by five sites per year, with emphasis on underserved Michigan communities. It also will support student travel to and from sites and expand pre-service and in-service learning.

In addition, the Center received cost-sharing funds to support the Michigan Neighborhood AmeriCorps Program, a partnership of five professional graduate schools: Business, Public Health, Public Policy, Social Work and Architecture and Urban Planning; and 12 community-based organizations working with the Michigan Neighborhood Partnership.

The School of Dentistry will use its two year grant for several outreach projects, including expansion of its 20-year-old Michigan Migrant Farm Dental Program, which brings dental services to workers at six sites in the Grand Traverse region of northern Michigan. In 1995 the program resulted in more than 1,000 treatment visits provided by 32 senior dental students. Records show that returning patients have reduced all types of restorative care and extractions because of the increase in preventive procedures.

The dental school also will expand its Geriatric Dental Service to nursing homes in communities besides Saline and Monroe that have asked to be included. Along with primary care, dental students provide oral health evaluations, dental consultations by physician referral and in-service training for nursing home staff. A new program will allow the dental school to extend services to public school children in Detroit and Calhoun County. Dental and dental hygiene students, under the supervision of a public health dentist, will provide health assessment, prevention and treatment services. Officials from both areas have asked the dental school to set up programs in schools where there is high enrollment in federally funded school lunch programs, an indication that many children are from homes near the poverty level.

MLink uses the resources and skills of the University to meet information needs of Michigan citizens by providing research services through public libraries, and electronic information made directly available to Michigan citizens.

Each community in Michigan, through its public library and MLink, has access to U-M resources and faculty to assist in economic and community development. Since mid-August 1995, MLink has assisted more than 170 communities; 1,000 business persons, government officials, educational administrators, health care and social service agencies have asked for and received information on topics ranging from regulations and issues regarding operation of an adult day care center to what tax and environmental concerns need to be addressed when a manufacturing plant seeks to locate in a community.

MLink also provides Internet training, and the Michigan Electronic Library (MEL), already recognized as one of the premier destinations on the World Wide Web. MEL specializes in business and government information, particularly Michigan state and local. MLink recently joined with the Library of Michigan to ensure that Michigan citizens will have “no cost” access to MEL

The School of Education‘s Innovation in K-12, Detroit Public Schools, will use its grant to help fund a collaborative project with the School of Social Work to assist Detroit Public Schools several years of study, Detroit schools last fall implemented schools within schools and added block scheduling and more counselors and social workers to work with students and parents to help stem a high drop-out rate among ninth-graders. A for-credit seminar will enroll DPS administrators, teachers from all 24 Detroit public high schools, and faculty and students from several U-M units to assess those efforts and identify other effective programs. The experiences gained from the Detroit program will be applicable to other urban areas, and accessible through distance-learning programs.

The School of Social Work will use its two-year grant to help launch the School of Social Work Michigan Human Service Internships. Intern teams will be assigned to an agency or project in underrepresented areas of the state. Wherever possible, student interns from other U-M units will be paired with social work students, who will be expected to provide up to 912 hours of direct service in their placement agencies, many of which are being forced to reduce services because of budget cutbacks.

Geographic targets for the new program include the west side of the state and southeastern Michigan. Because the school currently recruits a number of students from western Michigan, the interns will be familiar with the communities. Preliminary meetings have already been held with agency representatives in Grand Rapids and Muskegon.

Gov. John Engler and the Michigan Department of Community Health have asked for an assessment system to track youth health status and to determine the effectiveness of Michigan’s Exemplary Physical Education Curriculum (MI-EPEC). Charles Kuntzleman, a U-M Division of Kinesiology faculty member, is co-chair of MI-EPEC and chair of the Governor’s Council on Physical Fitness, Health and Sports. A Division of Kinesiology, MI-EPEC grant will enable the unit to launch a statewide assessment program to measure the physical fitness, activities, motors skills, behaviors and attitudes and beliefs of youth. Ultimately, schools would receive summaries permitting comparisons within and across districts; eventually the assessments would enable each child’s family to receive a personalized “report card.”

The assessment has potential for upgrading the way physical education is taught in Michigan and will reach virtually every community in Michigan. MI-EPEC’s membership includes representatives from government agencies, policy groups, professional physical education and fitness organizations, eight state universities and 10 public school districts. Part of the program will require training school personnel in assessment procedures through workshops, computer conferencing, interactive video and distance learning.

The Department of Sociology will expand its Community Service Learning Program that now places more than 500 U-M undergraduates in 40 local sites where they are required to spend 4-8 hours per week in offering counseling, tutoring, or performing para-professional activities.

The field sites include schools, day care centers, correctional institutions, half-way houses,chemical dependency programs, medical institutions, community agencies serving the frail elderly and homeless as well as in several student organizations on campus and the Program on Intergroup Relations and Conflict. The program will expand its student enrollment, add sites and assist undergraduates in publishing in journals seeking papers on innovations in undergraduate education.

The Community Science Connection: A Model for K-12 Science Education Reform draws its support from the U-M College of Engineering, and schools of Education, Information, and Public Health. Working in Detroit and Flint, faculty and students will link schools and the community in discovery-based projects such as examining the lead content of playground dirt. While the local community will serve as the source for developing the questions to be examined, it also will share in the findings, through student presentations and online postings.

Local community problems are authentic and motivating to students and teachers, and will serve as the vehicle through which science content and process are taught and learned, according to project coordinators. The project will demonstrate a model of science education reform that is based in local community public health issues; that employs an inquiry-based learning; and that uses technology through which teachers, students, researchers and the local community can learn and interact. Some of the Science Connection funds will be used to provide participating teachers and students with modern technological equipment.