Evans High School: The School That Became a Whole Community’s Front Door
Florida's first Community Partnership School turned a 'dropout factory' label into a statewide model — the story of the Silver Star Road school that carries Pine Hills.
3 minute read
Most high schools serve a neighborhood. Maynard Evans High School was rebuilt to carry one. The school at Silver Star Road and Pine Hills Road — Trojans, green and gold — is the civic anchor of Pine Hills, and in 2012 it became something no Florida school had been before: the state’s first Community Partnership School, a model that treats a school as the front door to health care, family support and opportunity for an entire community. This is the story of how a Pine Hills school became a national proof of concept.
A school as old as the suburb
Evans belongs to Pine Hills’ first generation. Plans for a high school here began in the early 1950s, as the new subdivisions filled with families; until then, Pine Hills students were bused across the county to Edgewater, Apopka and Winter Park. Evans opened in 1958 with grades seven through nine, named for Maynard Evans, a local pharmacist whose downtown Orlando pharmacy and soda shop were institutions of their day. The school was built in the segregation era and was not desegregated until 1971 — a history the community does not hide from. Through the following decades, as Pine Hills’ demographics transformed and new high schools redrew its catchment, Evans became a minority-majority school serving one of Orlando’s most diverse and most underserved communities.
The partnership that changed the model
The turnaround began in 2010, when the University of Central Florida and Children’s Home Society of Florida joined forces to build a new kind of school at Evans. The Community Partnership School model requires four core partners, each committed long-term: the school district (Orange County Public Schools), a university (UCF), a community nonprofit (Children’s Home Society) and a health-care provider (Orange Blossom Family Health). Together they wrap services around the school day — a health clinic offering medical, mental-health and dental care, after-school enrichment, adult education, family support and social services — on the theory, obvious once stated, that students cannot learn their way past untreated illness, instability and unmet basic needs.
In 2012, as Evans reopened in its completely rebuilt campus on Silver Star Road — construction finished in December 2011, the new campus opening that year — it formally became Florida’s first Community Partnership School. In 2018, UCF made it the first UCF-Certified Community Partnership School in the state. The results UCF reports are the kind that travel: Evans’ graduation rate climbed from 64 percent in the 2010–11 school year, when the partnership began, to 87 percent by 2016–17 and around 90 percent in the years since — at a school Johns Hopkins had once labeled a “dropout factory.” The model has since expanded to dozens of sites across Florida, all of them following the template written here.
What it means for Pine Hills
For the neighborhood, the partnership makes the school a shared asset rather than a fenced campus. The Pine Hills Neighborhood Improvement District’s own reporting calls Trojan pride “the heart and soul of our community, and the anchor of our neighborhoods, shopping plazas and worship centers” — and the geography agrees. Evans sits at the crossing of the community’s two northern arteries, a short walk from the Haitian and Caribbean kitchens of Silver Star Road that feed its students and families. Friday-night football here is a civic ritual; the school’s health and family services are a safety net; its campus is the neighborhood’s front lawn.
Visiting the story
You cannot tour Evans like a museum — it is a working school, and should be treated as one. But you can understand Pine Hills by standing at its corner: the rebuilt campus on one side, the food corridors our Where to Eat in Pine Hills roundup maps on the other, and seventy years of Orlando history in between. Put the school on your Orlando Top Spots Map as what it is — not an attraction, but the reason this neighborhood believes its own motto: many cultures, one bright future, with a graduation rate to prove it.
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