Every day classes of 20 to 25 education students take place in a t-building on the campus of Highland Elementary. The walls are decorated with poster board projects much like those that would adorn the walls of any elementary school. The students learn everything from how to manage a classroom to how to teach English, reading, and social studies. Four weeks of the semester, some days at the beginning and some at the end, the students go out into the school and tutor in the classrooms.

This is the way all of these students earn their entire 15-hour credit block for the semester. The program was developed by LSU instructor Debbie Guedry. “I think a benefit to the students is always being at a school setting so they feel more like they’re becoming educators,” says Guedry.

The Highland and LSU partnership is currently in its seventh year after having already completed and renewed two three-year contracts with East Baton Rouge Parish. While Highland was the first partnership developed, the college is fortunate to have additional partnerships with other schools including McKinley Middle, Sherwood Middle, and Cedarcrest.

These close ties were appreciated after a court order demanded all t-buildings torn down—except for one t-building left for the students of the Highland and LSU partnership to call home.

The lessons are taught on a block schedule by a team of three members of the LSU faculty: Jennifer Jolly, Margaret-Mary Sulentic Dowell, and Debbie Guedry. All of the classes take place in the t-building. Classes are held a half-hour off of the schedule of the on-campus classes to allow students driving time in case they have additional classes on campus.

Another perk of the program is the students’ ability to get immediate feedback on the teaching techniques they learn. “We do something different – we teach, then put them in the classrooms to try it, and then we meet and discuss how it went,” says Guedry. The students are able to return directly to the t-building and discuss what went right and what went wrong. They then get advice from the instructors and from their fellow students.

Through the partnership, students are able to take part in many different activities with the school and its  students, even attend field trips with them. “It’s a true hands-on experience,” says Guedry. These opportunities to experience everyday classroom life are not always available to students.

Guedry sits on the interview team for the hiring of new teachers at Highland Elementary and when the program began all the teachers on staff had to re-apply for their positions. Any teacher at Highland without a master’s degree must agree to begin earning credit hours to gain one. “We want quality teachers to help train our students,” says Guedry. In the past, graduate courses were even offered to help Highland teachers gain their master’s by allowing them to take nine credit hours on Highland’s campus after school. Because these classes were offered to the teachers at no charge to them, this option will return pending funding.

Guedry says this program is harder on the LSU faculty who teach in the t-building rather than on campus. They prepare the classroom, teach the classes, travel from LSU to Highland, and offer whatever support is needed to the faculty of Highland. “But it’s worth it,” she says. “We are giving our students the real world.”

An internal audit recommended that every student participate in this program. But currently there is no way to accomplish that because of space limitations. Other schools outside of East Baton Rouge Parish have asked LSU to enter into similar partnerships, but the resulting travel distance for students makes such partnerships nearly impossible. A neighboring parish even offered to provide a bus for the LSU students to take to the school.

The program is equally popular with the students enrolled in it. “I think one of the greatest things they walk away with is that they learn to form a cohort and a support system for each other,” says Guedry, “They laugh together, they cry together.” Guedry believes this advantage helps students to feel like they are a part of the school and that they are making a difference.

Guedry estimates at least eight students from last year, no longer enrolled in this program, now return to Highland Elementary as a “reading friend” to read aloud to a student. Even more impressive is that Highland Elementary has at one time hired as many as eight teachers who were at one time enrolled in the partnership program.

“We came full circle from training them to hiring them,” says Guedry. “Around year four or five they began returning and getting hired and we knew that it had really worked. If every school was run that way we’d have some really dynamite schools.”