Binghamton University Renames Community Schools Center After $1 Million Gift

A $1 million gift to Binghamton University, State University of New York, will significantly expand the university’s work to improve student outcomes in community schools, and it comes with a new name for the initiative at the heart of that effort. The university’s Center for Community Schools, housed within the College of Community and Public Affairs, has been renamed the Couper-Owens Center for Community Schools in honor of the families behind the donation. An official dedication ceremony took place on Friday, Sept. 18, at the University Downtown Center, marking both the financial commitment and the institutional recognition of a program that has grown into one of the most prominent examples of the university-assisted community schools model in the United States. The gift arrives at a moment when schools across New York and the nation are grappling with how to address the non-academic barriers, from food insecurity to housing instability to unmet mental health needs, that shape whether children can succeed in the classroom.

The center builds long-term partnerships with schools, community organizations, and families with the explicit goal of improving learning outcomes for students from pre-kindergarten through 12th grade. Its approach is grounded in research, evaluation, technical assistance, and school-based implementation, and it works to create equitable pathways for student success and community well-being. In practice, that work ranges from providing school-based social-emotional support to helping families and students meet basic needs such as food and housing. The model reflects a growing consensus in education research that academic achievement cannot be separated from the conditions in which children live. By embedding university resources directly within schools and communities, the center seeks to address those conditions where they arise rather than treating them as problems for schools to solve alone.

Laura Bronstein, dean of the College of Community and Public Affairs and founding director of the newly renamed center, described the gift as a catalyst for the program’s continuing mission. “The center has become a leader in the university-assisted community schools (UACS) model, and this gift really allows us to continue and expand our mission,” Bronstein said. “We are grateful to the donors for their ongoing support for what we do and for believing in our mission to make education accessible and impactful for all.” Her comments underscore the dual role the center plays: it is both an operating program that places university students and staff in local schools and a scholarly enterprise that studies what works in community school implementation and shares those findings across the state and beyond.

The funding will allow the center to continue and build upon a set of existing initiatives that together form the backbone of its work. Among the most visible of these is the placement of hundreds of Binghamton University students as interns and volunteers in schools, where they provide tutoring, mentoring, and social-emotional support to students from early grades through high school. The center also provides technical support and training to community schools around New York State, extending its reach well beyond the districts immediately surrounding the university. In addition, it conducts interdisciplinary research to evaluate student outcomes, generating evidence about how the community schools model affects attendance, engagement, academic performance, and family well-being. The new gift is intended to sustain and deepen each of these strands of activity.

The donors behind the gift were the late Janet C. Watrous and Robert Kochersberger, a couple with longstanding ties to the university who had previously dedicated the Charlie K. Community Schools Room, named for their son. The naming of the center itself carries personal and institutional significance. The first half of the Couper-Owens name honors the Couper family, founding figures in Binghamton University’s history, while the second half pays tribute to Kochersberger’s late mother, Marjorie Mae Owens, a school nurse in rural Western New York who was known for bringing food and clothing to the homes of her students in need. That history of direct, practical care for children echoes the center’s own philosophy of meeting students and families where they are.

Kochersberger explained that the gift reflected both family history and a conviction about the program’s distinctive reach. “The new center gave me and my late wife the opportunity to support it in a more tangible way, something that we really wanted to do, because our son was a former elementary school teacher, my mother was an elementary school nurse,” he said. “And we’ve just felt really strongly about supporting this program because it is almost unique in the country for the outreach that it does into public schools.” His characterization of the program as nearly singular in its depth of public school outreach highlights what distinguishes a full university-assisted model from more limited school-university partnerships: the integration of university personnel, research capacity, and student volunteers into the daily operations of schools over sustained periods.

Binghamton University President Anne D’Alleva framed the center’s work as an embodiment of the university’s broader public mission, praising the program as a national and global leader in community schools. “Community engagement, just like celebrating our history and traditions, is a critically important part of what we do,” D’Alleva said. “And I often talk about the four pillars of our work as a great public university in education, research and scholarship, economic development, and community engagement. And this program touches on everything we do and need to do as a great public university. So I am so grateful for this support. I am so grateful that we are moving this program forward and that we will continue to have impact through it, not only and most importantly in our surrounding communities, but across the state, nationally, and globally.”

For Luann Kida, senior director of capacity building and implementation at the Couper-Owens Center for Community Schools, the durability of relationships with local school districts is the key to the model’s effectiveness. “This isn’t a program that is set up down the hall and forgotten about,” Kida said. “We’re reaching families and making a real impact. We strive to create meaningful partnerships with schools, supporting their important work while trying to break the intergenerational cycle that so many kids and families get caught up in. Community schools bring together schools, families, and community partners to address barriers, creating learning environments where children can thrive.” Her emphasis on breaking intergenerational cycles points to the long time horizons involved: community schools are designed not as short-term interventions but as permanent institutional fixtures that serve successive cohorts of children within the same neighborhoods.

The technical core of the university-assisted community schools model lies in its integration of services that are typically scattered across separate agencies. Expanding mental health services and making them available directly in schools is a key initiative of the UACS model at Whitney Point, one of the districts the center serves, where social work interns meet with students inside the high school rather than requiring families to navigate external clinics and waiting lists. That placement matters for outcomes: school-based services reduce transportation and scheduling obstacles, reach children who might otherwise go unserved, and allow social workers and counselors to coordinate with teachers who see students every day. Similar logic applies to the center’s work on basic needs, where connecting families to food and housing assistance removes obstacles that research consistently links to absenteeism and disengagement.

As the Couper-Owens Center for Community Schools moves forward under its new name, the $1 million gift positions it to extend a model that Binghamton University leaders describe as influential well beyond the Southern Tier of New York. The combination of sustained school partnerships, a pipeline of university student interns and volunteers, statewide technical assistance, and interdisciplinary evaluation research gives the center an unusually complete footprint within the community schools field. With the dedication ceremony at the University Downtown Center now behind it, the center’s task is to convert new philanthropic support into continued and expanded impact for students from pre-K through 12th grade, in the surrounding communities first and, as D’Alleva noted, across the state, nationally, and globally.

Subject of Research: University-assisted community schools and philanthropic support for expanding student services at Binghamton University

Article Title: Binghamton University community schools center gets new name, $1 million boost

Article References: Binghamton University community schools center gets new name, $1 million boost. (n.d.). Original publication

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Keywords: Binghamton University, community schools, university-assisted community schools, philanthropy, education, student outcomes, mental health services, school partnerships, New York State, College of Community and Public Affairs, social-emotional support, educational equity