Ward J. “Jack” Timken is a leader of the business and philanthropic community who helped to establish the Stark Education Partnership and who has nurtured the organization over the last 20 years. He is quick to point out that neither he, nor his brother, Ambassador W.R. Timken Jr., the former chairman of the Timken Co., worked alone. A coalition of charitable foundations — Timken, Deuble, Hoover and Stark Community — provided the initial $3 million investment in 1989 to form what was first known as The Education Enhancement Partnership.

“One day, Mr. Umstattd (former Timken Co. President William E. Umstattd) asked me, ‘How many bearings can you make?’ Well, not many,” said Jack Timken.

The lesson: It takes thousands of people to make the Timken Co. succeed.  And so it is with the work of improving the community.

Ward J. "Jack" Timken of the Timken Foundation

Timken believes in the community’s commitment to education

The Timken family’s interest in education always was centered on helping students become qualified workers and productive members of society, Jack Timken explained. Timken High School in downtown Canton started as an effort, during the Great Depression of the 1930s, “to give unemployed youths a sense of work and skill. These were the years of the Great Depression, and the jobs that were available went to the fathers of high school graduates,” Timken said. Timken family leaders thought that, “We have to teach these kids about getting a job and holding a job before they get to the point were they are competing with their dads for jobs. Teach them how to run a machine. Teach them a little bit of engineering,” Timken said.

Eventually, it became a full vocational high school, but never a memorial to Timken family investments in education. Jack Timken said that his father, W.R. Timken Sr., once told him, “’Blow it up if it is in the way.’ Timken High School is just a place where you teach, not a monument. That has nothing to do with what we’re talking about. We are trying to elevate the process of education so that kids learn quicker,” said Timken. In the late 1990s, the Timken Foundation made a $10 million grant to help develop the Timken Regional Campus of Canton City Schools in downtowns Canton. But, even then, the Timkens were not interested in building buildings. Timken said they were interested in investing in technology and the tools needed to improve education.

The important link between education and economic development

These days, business leaders and business organizations constantly point out the link between education and economic development. It is a link that community leaders here have realized for many decades. “We understand the link between education and economic development because we are a manufacturing state. Consequently we understood the link between education and manufacturing, and that is what Tim had said some time back when he said to these kids, ‘We don’t want you unless you have sufficient education to be of value to us.’” said Jack Timken.

“So we’re saying, ‘If you are going to work for us, it’s no longer going to be enough for you to finish high school and go down and get a job with the company.’ We did that for a long time, and we did it too long.”

Jack Timken and the Timken Foundation remain intensely involved in the community’s work of raising the overall level of education in Stark County, Ohio, particularly in improving the paths of college access for Stark County students.

Today, the Stark Education Partnership’s board consists of Timken, as president of the Timken Foundation; Candy Wallace of the Stark Community Foundation; Walter Stanislawski of the Paul and Carol David Foundation; Dr. John O’Donnell, president of Stark State College of Technology; Richard S. Milligan of the Buckingham, Doolittle & Burroughs law firm, and a member of the Canton City Board of Education; Paralee W. Compton, former assistant superintendent of Canton City Schools; Theodore V. Boyd of First Communications; Judge Michael L. Howard of the Stark County Family Court; Robert F. Vail of Vail Industries; Sarah M. Brown, former chair of the Ohio Ethics Commission, and Judge W. Don Reader, retired judge of the Ohio 5th District Court of Appeals.