A common complaint of university campuses is that they can be isolated, ivory-tower-like places. At Johns Hopkins University, this is not the case. Through a series of initiatives directed at local K-12 schools that have been implemented piece by piece over the years, the university is directly engaged with the urban, and occasionally troubled, community that surrounds its campus.
One such initiative has just started its second year of implementation: Johns Hopkins’ STEM Achievement in Baltimore Elementary Schools (SABES) program. SABES’ goal is to raise STEM as a value in Baltimore.
SABES came about from a series of discussions at Johns Hopkins on how to best formulate a collaboration between the School of Education, the Whiting School of Engineering and Baltimore City Public Schools. With a $7.4 million, five-year grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 2012, SABES moved off the ground and helped make those conversations a reality.
The NSF has funded math and science partnership programs for many years before Johns Hopkins applied for a grant. But the year Johns Hopkins applied, the NSF had identified a few target areas for the program, one of which was community enterprise for STEM engagement.
“So [SABES is] a little different than prior MSPs [Mathematics and Science Partnership programs] because the idea was that we would not simply focus on, let’s say, a classroom or a school or teacher professional development, but that we would think about the community as a whole and think about how to reach beyond the classroom,” says Dr. Michael Falk, a professor of materials science and engineering at Johns Hopkins. Falk is a principal investigator with SABES.
Since the approach is not to adopt a whole school district, but rather engage with communities, SABES has concentrated its outreach to Greektown/Highlandtown, a neighborhood in southeastern Baltimore with a sizable Hispanic population; Greater Homewood, which directly surrounds the Johns Hopkins campus; and Park Heights, which is home to a large foreign-born Black population in Baltimore.
