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“I’m very excited to join the Hamilne-Hancock staff,” Anderson said. “I’m looking forward to working with the staff and kids at the school, and I’m also looking forward to building bridges over at Hamline.”

According to Samantha Henningson, coordinator of the collaboration, Anderson is now in charge of the Hancock side of things, making sure all curriculum is approved. She says that Anderson will do a good job advancing an already flourishing program.

“He is a 6th grade classroom teacher, so he has that perspective,” Henningson said. “I think he had some good ideas, he seemed straightforward, likeable, passionate, and enthusiastic about education.”

Anderson says that his background might allow him to add art into the collaboration, but added that he wasn’t going to completely change things upon arrival.

“I think I want to hear the ideas that people already have,” he said. “Tradition is important. It’s an important thing to have. However, there’s always room to grow.”

Under McParland, who took a job with the Minnesota Department of Education, the collaboration grew immensely.

“When she started, you could ask people at Hamline what the Hamline-Hancock collaboration is and they’d be, ‘Huh?,’ but now it’s hard to find anyone here that hasn’t heard of Hancock,” Henningson said. “She was about getting out that awareness. Many more Hamline students do work study over there now than there used to.”

McParland says she can’t pick out one thing as her proudest accomplishment at Hamline. Instead, she cherishes all the time she spent with the collaboration.

“The six-and-a-half years, the amazing thing to me is to look at the growth and impact that it has had on the lives of so many people,” she said. “I can’t summarize it in one instance.”

McParland left in October, and the collaboration made do without a Hancock liaison for nearly three weeks. Henningson said that the jobs previously held by McParland were split up among several different people. It caused a little bit of confusion, but she says they were able to work through it.

“For one part of the job, you’d have to talk to one person, and especially with Hamline students who work over there, scheduling got transferred to a different person and time cards got put somewhere else,” she said. “So it didn’t go entirely smoothly, but there were no huge disasters.”