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Educating the Whole Student
Photo by Genaro Vavuris
“We knew the education system was broken,” says Meredith Liu (MBA 2010) of her first meetings with Priscilla Chan, who founded the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a philanthropic organization that she founded with her husband, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “So we asked, what could we do if we started over?” The answer: The Primary School, an ambitious experiment in reinventing education to better serve lower-income students, students of color, and their families. The school, which opened its doors in East Palo Alto, California, in 2016, integrates academics with health care and family-support services, all of which are offered tuition free.
Liu, now the president and COO of The Primary School, came to the project as an educator; Chan came to it as a pediatrician. Together, they developed three guiding principles, which Liu says sets the school, which is funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, apart from other models. First, The Primary School enrolls students as close to birth as possible. “We know the majority of brain development happens in the first few years of life,” Liu explains. Second, the school partners with a local health center, which has facilities on-site. Finally, it is committed to engaging parents through parent coaches and parent discussion groups.
This year a second school will open in Hayward, California, but Liu is perhaps even more excited that plans are now under way to pilot the successful family-support model at a handful of schools nationwide. “The question is, can these ideas be replicated by other organizations?” says Liu. “This is about millions of children, not just the several hundred we serve every day at The Primary School. We want to change the system.”
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