Change in leadership for K-12 engagement

Change in leadership for K-12 engagement

BY JESSICA STARK
Rice News staff

Rice University deepened its commitment to improving and supporting K-12 education by creating the Office of K-12 Initiatives last July. Under the leadership of Siva Kumari as founding associate provost, the office has facilitated and overseen kindergarten, elementary and secondary school projects undertaken by Rice faculty and staff.

The office was created to coordinate existing university-wide K-12 engagement and instigate new projects to fulfill Rice’s Vision for the Second Century in this area and make a meaningful impact in this important constituency of the Houston community.

	SIVA KUMARI		CAROL QUILLEN

The Office of K-12 Initiative’s mission will remain the same but its leadership will change in March when Kumari leaves Rice and Houston to work as regional director for the International Baccalaureate in the Asia Pacific Region. She will be based in Singapore and be responsible for one of three global centers in a region that currently has more than 350 schools in more than 20 countries, including India, China and Australia. 

“K-12 initiatives at Rice are thriving and vibrant because of the competent people who run them, their passion and dedication,” Kumari said. “So it’s very hard for me to say goodbye to all the wonderful and exciting programs that are so well-regarded in the Houston community and throughout the nation. But it was a dream of mine to eventually work internationally, and the call came just a few years before I expected. The wonderful outcome here is that K-12 at Rice is going to be well-tended.”

Upon Kumari’s departure, the Office of K-12 Initiatives will be staffed by a new program director, Maxie Hollingsworth, and report directly to Carol Quillen, associate provost for Academic Affairs. Staff and faculty will still be able to submit their ideas or proposals for K-12 engagement programs through the office’s e-mail address, K12@rice.edu.

The vision for the office is to make a meaningful impact in three categories: teacher professional development, college access and readiness, and school leadership.

Each year Rice outreach efforts directly or indirectly touch approximately 7,000 K-12 teachers and 100,000 students, stretching from the Greater Houston area to the nation.

Rice’s programs are known for emphasizing content and treating teachers as professionals, and although Rice does not have a school of education, thousands of elementary and secondary school teachers come to campus each year for training in math, science, engineering, technology and other specialties. The teacher professional development programs are conducted by a variety of schools, centers, institutes and departments at Rice.

More than 3,000 K-12 teachers come to Rice each year for the Advanced Placement Summer Institute, the International Baccalaureate workshops and other programs run by the Susanne M. Glasscock School of Continuing Studies. In addition, more than 500 educators are involved in the Rice University School Mathematics Project (RUSMP), which was established in 1987, and attend a wide gamut of courses, including a summer campus program. The Center for Education also administers long-standing programs, including the Rice Regional Elementary Model Science Lab.

Through its collaborations, the Office of K-12 Initiatives has been able to offer programs that put Rice professors in K-12 classrooms around Houston to help foster college access and readiness. Not only has that given K-12 students the rare opportunity to learn from top scholars, it has shown them the possibilities of a university education. Programs such as the Civic Humanist, run in alliance with the Humanities Research Center, and the Civic Scientist series, run in alliance with the Baker Institute for Public Policy, are prime examples of this effort. Through the Center for Civic Engagement, many student groups are also presenting content in local schools.

Through projects such as the recently developed Rice Educational Entrepreneurship Program (REEP), the Office of K-12 Initiatives is training current and aspiring school leaders to effect change in their schools at an institutional level. Jointly administered with the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management and funded by a grant from Houston Endowment, REEP combines a business school education with an intensive educational entrepreneurship curriculum taught by acclaimed faculty and practitioners.

To start a dialogue about leadership and school reform, the program initiated a speaker series in alliance with Houston A+ Challenge, KIPP schools and Teach for America. The series has brought in K-12 leaders Michelle Rhee, chancellor of Washington, D.C., public schools; Frederick Hess, resident scholar and director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research; and Jay Mathews, author and education reporter for the Washington Post. Wendy Kopp, founder and CEO of Teach for America, and Howard Fuller, director of the Institute for the Transformation of Learning based at Marquette University, are scheduled to speak in March.

“Through these K-12 initiatives you can see that we are very serious about responding to the mission to make an impact as articulated in the Vision for the Second Century,” Kumari said. “It has been an honor to be a part of these efforts during a very exciting time at this university that has been my professional home for many years now. I was so lucky to have worked with individuals and departments on this campus who have been so wonderfully supportive in creating systems and projects through this office. My gratitude for their energy and the significant support of the senior administration is enormous. Rice is a hard place to leave.” 

Kumari came to Rice in 1994 and became the associate dean of the Susanne M. Glasscock School of Continuing Studies in 2000. Under her leadership the AP Institute — the school’s longest running program for teachers — more than doubled, making it the largest program of its kind in the country. To expand those efforts, Kumari initiated the International Baccalaureate workshops at Rice in 2005, and it has grown six times as large. Rice is the only university offering professional development for teachers in both of the major college preparatory programs. Kumari has received national, state and local grants and professional awards for her work.

Kumari was appointed adviser to the provost for K-12 initiatives in 2006 while continuing to serve as associate dean at the Glasscock School. In 2008, she was named the first associate provost for K-12 Initiatives and was charged with creating the Office of K-12 Initiatives.