Echoing the highly successful Family of Five Schools Initiative at the University Park Campus, USC officials entered into a
formal relationship with two schools near the Health Sciences Campus in September.
The partnership means that USC will deepen its ties with Murchison Elementary and Bravo Medical Magnet High School, where HSC students, faculty and staff have volunteered their efforts for years.
The agreement has been in the works since 1996, just two years after President Steven B. Sample launched the original Family of Five Schools Initiative. Expanding the outreach to HSC’s neighborhood schools was a win-win proposition, says senior vice president for external relations Jane Pisano.
“Improving public safety and the quality of neighborhood schools is just as critical to East Los Angeles as it has been to the University Park area,” she says. “The rewards will similarly flow to both the campus and its community partners.”
The Family of Five Schools Initiative funnels USC volunteers and resources to five schools in the University Park area. The schools also get the lion’s share of money collected from USC employees during the annual Good Neighbors Campaign, through programs that directly benefit their 8,000 pupils.

Deepening USC’s involvement with the East Los Angeles schools will be a gradual process, but immediate changes are already evident.
This year, Bravo and Murchison received six USC employee-funded Neighborhood Outreach Grants. Both now participate in a USC School of Social Work outreach effort that supplies social work interns to schools. Reading Is Healthy, a literacy project run by USC’s Department of Nursing, also now benefits the two East L.A. schools. Principal Robert Bilovsky’s request for a School of Dentistry program at Murchison has been approved; and Choices Unlimited, an after-school mentoring program administered by the Department of Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy, has been extended to the elementary school.
A USC-based program places nursing students in the nurse’s office at Murchison. Another offers SAT preparation classes at Bravo. Both schools now participate in a USC School of Engineering program called Mission Masters that demonstrates basic science concepts through fun, creative projects. And teachers from Bravo and Murchison have begun signing up for Leavey Library’s Web Masters/Info Masters sessions, in which they acquire Internet and Web authoring skills.

---