UMass Chan Medical School
EN-10: Community Partnerships

The North Quadrant Support Services initiative builds on the highly successful 21-year academic partnership between the Medical School and the North Quadrant of the Worcester Public Schools. This program aims to address some of the socioeconomic barriers to academic success faced by many of the students in this school district. With the support of the Remillard Family Community Service Fund, UMMS has addressed a number of needs which include: stocking a food pantry at the North High School to supply nutritiously balanced food, supplying washers and dryers to serve students in need of laundry services and delivering backpacks filled with school supplies to elementary school students to ensure that they are able to start off the school year with the necessary tools to succeed.

Led by UMMS since 1996, the Worcester Pipeline Collaborative engages with every school in the North Quadrant in an effort to prepare students for higher education and careers in the region’s health care and science industries.  UMMS’s involvement is particularly intensive in North High School, Worcester Technical High School and Worcester East Middle School – helping guide the Health/Science Academy at North High and the Allied Health and Biotechnology programs at Worcester Technical High School.  The Pipeline’s mission is to encourage, educate and challenge students, many of whom are economically disadvantaged and/or from ethnic or racial groups underrepresented in biotechnology, biomedical research and health care professions, to become college and career ready so they can pursue careers in these fields.  Partnership activities include mentoring, job-shadowing, tutoring, clinical, observerships, research internships, after-school science programs, visiting scientist programs, a speaker's bureau and family involvement activities. UMMS staff dedicated to the Pipeline include a full time Master’s Degree level coordinator, an administrative assistant and additional staff resources measuring in the hundreds of hours.

UMMS operates a statewide summer program to provide academic enrichment to high school students from disadvantaged backgrounds or from ethnic or racial groups underrepresented in biomedical research, biotechnology and the health professions.  Although the program is statewide, Worcester students participate at a very high rate, typically making up the majority of students in the program (and in some years 100% of the students).In 2013, we estimated the combined value of staff time dedicated to the Pipeline Collaborative and to Worcester student participation in the statewide high school summer program (i.e., prorated for Worcester participation) to be approximately $240,000.  It is notable that this figure which does not include the time of twenty-five to thirty UMMS professionals who host and supervise the high school job-shadowing/interns in their departments each semester. In addition, through the WPC, two students from NHS and two from WTHS receive full scholarships each summer from the National Youth Leader Forum of Medicine.