School Of Communication And Media Partnership With Orange Community Schools Set To Launch

The School of Communication and Media began its collaboration with the Orange Community School Initiative this spring semester.  The partnership will kick off with projects from two courses in the school – Transmedia Projects and Public Relations Management.  The OCSI mission is to align University expertise and resources in a community engagement strategy that will address the pressing educational, social and economic needs of the partner schools and their communities by uniting nonprofits, governmental agencies, the business community, and institutions of higher education in common purpose.

Professor Beverly Peterson and students in her Transmedia Projects course will undertake a mapping project that aims to address health and wellness issues in the Township of Orange.  The university students will conduct background research, using available county data, conduct interviews with Orange School site coordinators and key Orange community stakeholders, and then develop a visual map of health-related opportunities in Orange.  Depending on the timeline, the project may also extend to crowdsourcing community member stories to capture their experiences of living in Orange that can be integrated into the map.  The goal of this project is to accurately represent the Orange physical and resource landscape and launch on online “Health Literacy Hub” that can grow into a virtual town hall for the community.

Students in the Public Relations Management course, under the tutelage of Professor Larry Weiner, will develop a full scale strategic public relations plan for the Orange clinic.  This piece of the initiative will begin with background research and interviews with clinic personnel and Orange School site coordinators and the final product will be a public relations road map that the clinic can use to reach its goal of registering 50 families by the end of this school year.  That strategic plan will include recommendations for both traditional and online public relations actions.  Time permitting in the semester, the class will also begin executing certain aspects of the plan. 

In 2013 Montclair State University launched the university-assisted community school initiative to help educate, engage, and empower members of the Rosa Parks and Oakwood Avenue School communities in Orange, New Jersey. The OCSI (Orange Community School Initiative) grew from the ongoing community school project at Rosa Parks and a JP Morgan Chase Foundation planning grant that developed the needs assessment with Oakwood Avenue School and its community. In recognition of the University’s efforts in this area, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching designated Montclair State University as a Community Engaged Campus in January 2015.