[EdTalks] Inside Greenville's Public-Private Education Partnerships

How do we solve complex challenges within our public schools, from teacher shortages to early learning gaps? In this episode of Simple Civics: Ed Talks, we explore the power of public-private partnerships in education in Greenville County. Hosts Catherine Schumacher, CEO of Public Education Partners (PEP), and Derek Lewis, Executive Director of Greenville First Steps, turn the spotlight on their own organizations. They reveal the critical role nonprofits play as "connective tissue," bridging the gap between community resources and the needs of Greenville County Schools to support students, families, and teachers.

In this deep dive, Catherine and Derek explain the unique missions of their organizations and how they collaborate to strengthen the entire educational pipeline. You'll learn about Greenville First Steps' focused mission on early childhood education in Greenville SC, ensuring every child is ready for kindergarten through strategic funding and programs like the Dolly Parton Imagination Library. We then explore how Public Education Partners functions as an innovation partner for the school district, championing teacher support programs in Greenville like the Greenville Alternative Teacher Education (GATE) program, which creates new pathways for professionals to become educators. The conversation also tackles one of the most pressing issues facing families and the workforce: the child care crisis in Greenville County, revealing a staggering need for 4,500 new child care spots and discussing how the business community can be part of the solution. This episode is a must-watch for anyone who wants to understand the landscape of educational support in our community and learn how to get involved with public schools, whether you're a parent, business leader, voter, or concerned citizen. Discover how these effective public-private partnerships in education in Greenville County are creating a stronger future for everyone.

Episode Resources:

• Read about the Greenville Alternative Teacher Education (GATE) Program

• Listen to the Future Teacher Academy episode

• Learn more about Greenville First Steps

• Learn more about Public Education Partners

Introduction

Catherine Schumacher: There are hundreds of organizations that are supporting the educational pipeline here in Greenville County. On Simple Civics Ed Talks, we are excited to shine a spotlight on them so that you can get more involved. I'm Catherine Schumacher with Public Education Partners. Today on the podcast, Derek Lewis, Executive Director of Greenville First Steps, and I are going to start with the organizations we know best, our own.

Derek and I have been recording these podcasts for a couple of weeks now, and we thought it might be useful for listeners to know a little bit about why us and how we're coming into these conversations, what our organizations do, and our background as well. I thought we would do this short episode to talk about First Steps and PEP and our connections to education and the education landscape here in Greenville. So, Derek, we're going to go back and forth. Why don't you tell me and listeners about First Steps? What is First Steps and what do they do?

The Mission of Greenville First Steps: Getting Children Ready for Kindergarten

Derek Lewis: First Steps was created in 1999 and there is one in every county in South Carolina. There's a Greenville First Steps and Pickens First Steps and Laurens First Steps. Our sole focus is getting children ready for kindergarten. Most of what we do in Greenville is fund other programs to improve what they do. We help PEP with children's books for children zero to five. We help the library with some parenting programs that they deliver.

Catherine Schumacher: So you're an intermediary. You're not providing direct programs, but you're supporting other programs.

Derek Lewis: That's right. We hope to improve the capacity of others because there's so much great work happening in Greenville. It is easier and more cost-effective for us to improve their work than it is to start something new that we're running ourselves.

Public Education Partners (PEP): An Innovation Partner for Greenville County Schools

Catherine Schumacher: Absolutely. And public education partners, or PEP, we function in a similar way. We also do provide some direct programming, but we're also trying to build connections. PEP was founded in the mid-80s, so we've been around for 40 years, which is really cool. We had our 40th anniversary in the spring. We were founded by the business community and the civic community here in Greenville because they knew that if we wanted to have a great community and a community that we could be proud of, and that was an engine for growth and inclusion and economic mobility, that we needed a strong public school system.

I always say that we function as an innovation partner for Greenville County schools and a champion for public education in general. We have three focus areas. We champion teachers, we equip families, and we advance collaboration. We do that through a range of programs working both on the ground but also at the systems level, creating connections so that organizations that are working in the schools can do that work better. And that's what we do.

Derek Lewis: And PEP is unique. There's not a PEP in every county. The idea of having a nonprofit that is separate from the school district but is aligned with helping the school districts.

Catherine Schumacher: There are other public education partners in some counties in South Carolina. We are the oldest and the largest by far. And we do the most and we function a little differently than the rest of them. But the way we work in a lot of ways is we might identify an opportunity in the district, a challenge. Maybe it's how do we find new teachers or how do we help teachers with classroom management. We'll work closely with the district to come up with a strategy, a pilot to introduce something new. And then we go out into the private sector to raise the money to pilot that.

And then if it works, the district will absorb it into operations. A great example is the GATE program, the Greenville Alternative Teacher Education Program, which brings people who don't have an education degree into the classroom to teach. And that's become one of the most successful strategies that the district has for finding great new teachers, with terrific retention rates with GATE.

Funding Models: How Public-Private Partnerships Support Education

Our funding, we're funded, it's all private funding. We don't have any government funding, just generous individuals and corporate partners and foundations. That's our funding model. How is First Steps funded?

Derek Lewis: We're a little bit of both. We get an allocation from the General Assembly. Every county gets an allocation based on the number of children in poverty that are between the ages of zero and five. And then we are asked to take those dollars and go out and leverage other dollars. We will take the $1.2 million that the General Assembly allocates to Greenville and turn it into a $3 million budget by usually going to the Community Foundation or Hollingsworth Funds or the United Way and saying, "This new parenting program we want to launch is going to cost a million dollars a year. We'll put in half a million if you'll put in half a million."

Catherine Schumacher: It's public-private. It's the same sort of thing. It's public-private partnerships. The way that PEP functions is our role is to leverage the public tax dollars that are going into the school system. And that's exactly how we have functioned for years. So how big is your budget?

Derek Lewis: Our budget varies from year to year, but it's about two and a half to three million dollars a year total.

Catherine Schumacher: And you all are also the pass-through for the Dolly Parton Imagination Library. So how does that work?

Derek Lewis: We are. Dolly is a unique program in that the perception in the community is that Dolly Parton Imagination Library funds itself. Basically, what they're doing is making the cost half as expensive as it would be if we mailed out books to all of these families every month on our own. They send us a bill for basically the other half of the cost, and then we just pay that bill.

Catherine Schumacher: And the General Assembly has put some money behind the Imagination Library to roll it out statewide.

Derek Lewis: They have. They have approved some funding that hasn't quite been allocated to the county partnerships yet. But the idea was that in Greenville County, for example, it would be $750,000 a year for Dolly Parton Imagination Library to be countywide. And that would be every family getting a free children'ss book every month until the child turns five. We're working towards that goal.

Serving as "Connective Tissue" for Community and School Collaboration

Catherine Schumacher: I think it's really interesting that you need organizations to be connective tissue. That's what I talk about with PEP a lot, that we're connections between. And I get a lot of calls from folks saying, "We want to do a thing. We have an idea for something. How can we implement that? Who do we need to talk to at the district?" And so we do a lot of that work as well, just to open doors and make sure that they're talking to the right people. Because Greenville County Schools is so large, as you and I have discussed before, knowing how to navigate it and how to think through that big question of how the thing that you might want to do fits into the bigger picture, I think is a really valuable role that both an organization like First Steps and PEP can play.

Derek Lewis: It's been one of the things I've really appreciated about PEP, too, is that you have the ability to know what's going on outside of Greenville County and to talk about, "We've seen in Texas that this is how this is implemented. Could we try something like that here?" And I think PEP brings to the table so much knowledge and experience from outside of the community that we could pilot here and it could be successful. I think Make Summer Count is a great example of a program we weren't doing before PEP was doing it.

Catherine Schumacher: And Make Summer Count is our early literacy initiative that was started about 10 or 11 years ago that really focuses on how do we get books into the hands of kids to build their home libraries, but also supporting families so that they can do a better job of helping their children read at home. Which I know is a theme that we've had in several of our podcasts here, that literacy piece. How do we make it easier for families to support student learning around literacy? Because literacy is the foundation for all of it.

The Hosts' Personal Journeys to Education Advocacy

So your background, we'll get a little personal. What's your background? How did you get involved with First Steps?

Derek Lewis: I was a camp counselor at Camp Greenville while I was in college at Georgia Southern. I just fell in love with Greenville and decided that at that point—I was going to film school at the University of Texas—and decided that that was not what I was going to do with my life and ended up working for the Y for about 15 years and just loved Greenville and loved the Y. I met my wife at Camp Greenville. One of the things about the Y is that it puts you in front of all these other organizations that are doing great work. So one of the things I was doing was I was on a gang prevention task force. And we were talking about how 10-year-olds were joining gangs.

And it just really made me rethink, all this youth work that we're doing is too late. And Hedrick Lewis, my wife, who is much smarter than me, has been working in early childhood her entire life. She and I went for a walk one night and I said, "I just feel like I'm on the wrong end of this work." And she said, "Well, I've been telling you all along that if we don't get it right by the time they get to kindergarten, we're too late." And literally the next week, the job at First Steps came open and I applied and I've been there for 18 years since.

Catherine Schumacher: Wow. And of course, you also served on the school board for two terms.

Derek Lewis: I did. That was eight years. I enjoyed six of them. And then COVID came and it was a little less fun. But the school board was a great experience and it was incredible to me how eager people in the district are to have partners to collaborate with them. Just like the community is struggling with how to get the district a partner, the district also is struggling with how do we find the right people who can help us with some of these needs that we don't think are a part of government. It's not government's job to do all of these things. So how do we find somebody that can help with housing so that we can maybe connect families who are homeless with housing options in the community? I love that part of being on the board.

Catherine Schumacher: And that's one of the things that we're really eager in these Ed Talks to explore is who and what are some of the organizations that are partnering to help do that work with the district? Because it is too much for one, especially a district the size of Greenville. It is too much for one entity to manage on their own. And so that partnership piece is really important.

And that's certainly how I came to PEP. I'm not an educator. My background is a nonprofit; I've been in the nonprofit sector primarily as a fundraiser for a long time, 27 years. But I'm a public school person. I grew up, went all the way through the public schools in Spartanburg. Our kids have gone all the way through the public schools here in Greenville. I'm a huge supporter of public schools. I think they're so, so important. And so I was on the PEP board, actually. That is how, when the opportunity presented itself, I was ready to dig in. And I knew this was an issue that I would be passionate about.

It's been really fun to see PEP evolve after COVID in particular to how can we be nimble? How can we meet the needs of the community now? How can we particularly support teachers? I think for PEP, your lane, I would say, is services to kids. And I think PEP, while we do have some programs that work with students, to serve students, our real lane is teachers and families. So helping PTAs, SIC members understand how they can get involved. Helping teachers understand how they can understand the ecosystem that they're working in and how can they advocate for themselves more effectively. So I think that is a really unique role that PEP can play. And it's been a lot of fun over the last six years. It'll be six years. Actually, oh, my gosh, we're recording this on November 5th. And it was yesterday. It was my six-year anniversary. Thanks. My Pep-aversary was yesterday.

Future Focus: Supporting New Teachers and Tackling the Child Care Crisis

Derek Lewis: I think one of the cool things that PEP has done that we have always appreciated in our family is I don't think that there's enough celebration of the incredibly hard work that teachers put into their jobs. I think PEP has done a great job of really celebrating and raising up the sector, not just to tell teachers you're valuable, but to have a night at the Drive where teachers can be applauded in the same way that we would applaud firefighters and public safety folks. But also the work you're doing with 16 and 17-year-olds who are thinking about their career options and uplifting teaching as a profession that all of us could aspire to, not just settle for, has just been really exciting.

Catherine Schumacher: Well, and thanks for mentioning that, because one of the things we wanted to talk about today was what are we most excited about? We have a growing partnership with the Future Teacher Academy. We've done a podcast—that was one of our earliest podcasts—is talking with Rachel Turner, who leads the Future Teacher Academy at Greenville County Schools. And that is, how do we find the teachers of tomorrow and really, again, lifting up and celebrating the profession of educators because we really, we do need those teachers and they're out there. That's what's so great about being involved with future teachers is you can really see kids who are so excited.

And that's pushing back. I have a lot of strong feelings about folks who say that our public schools are failing. We have a lot of great data that says that's just not true. Obviously, we can always do better. And I think that's what these conversations and talks are about. It's the work that you're doing on early literacy. It's the work that we're doing across the K-12 pipeline and beyond. We know there's always things that can be done better, but we also, I think it's important to celebrate the good stuff that is happening every single day. So what are you excited about?

Derek Lewis: We have always been involved in early literacy and parenting, and I think those are two things that we're going to have to continue to work in. But access to affordable, quality child care has been a real crisis in our community. Last month, we were able to project that we need 4,500 new infant and toddler child care spots in Greenville County today, just so that 4,500 families can return to work. So working with the business sector to help them see there are opportunities for you to build a child care system on your property and then hand the keys over to an organization that could run it for you. You don't have to be in the child care business and also the tire business has been what I think is our big next thing.

Catherine Schumacher: And high-quality child care is part of our education pipeline. High-quality child care means you're not just sitting the kid down and doing nothing; it is about engaging and active support. So I think it's all part of the same universe of how are we going to support the whole community. And that's a big issue for teachers too—child care is a huge issue. It's part of the reason that when you think about why it's important for us to raise teacher salaries, it's so that they can afford high-quality child care so that they can be there for our kids and their kids. It's both.

Well, aside from that, I'm really excited about these podcasts. This has been really fun so far. I hope that listeners have enjoyed them. But it's a great opportunity for both of us to talk about a thing that we both really care about, not only as community leaders, but just as people.

A Call to Action: How You Can Support the Education Pipeline

Derek Lewis: And I'm glad you saw that connection. I know we've been talking intentionally about it, but so much of these podcasts are about helping people understand these are the things that exist in our community and this is how you can get involved with them. So whether you're a citizen or a parent or a business owner or a funder, a voter, these are all things that matter to a lot of our community and there are ways that you can help out.

Catherine Schumacher: I applaud you've been in the leadership at Greater Good Greenville. It's really exciting to be partnering with First Steps and Greater Good Simple Civics on these podcasts. And I'm just grateful for the invitation and the opportunity.

Derek Lewis: Good job, Catherine.

Catherine Schumacher: All right. Talk soon.

Simple Civics Ed Talks is a joint project of Greater Good Greenville, Greenville First Steps, and Public Education Partners Greenville County.