March 2009

Letter from the Editor

I’ve been trying to reach my son’s high school counselor, a phenomenal woman destined for certain sainthood, for days. She finally called me at 9:30 last night, apologizing profusely for not getting back to me earlier, but explaining that following her visits to the Junior classes to discuss graduation requirements she had – get this – 75 phone messages to return today alone. 75??? At 5 minutes per phone call that’s six and a half hours - except we talked for 10. Insurance salesmen and auto loan agents make 75 phone calls a day, but high school counselors? When they apply for jobs do they get bonus points for previous experience in telemarketing?

Project Finish Line
by
Dave Kollar
Director, Office of Dropout Prevention
Jeffco Public Schools

Jeffco Schools educates approximately 86,000 students each school year. In the 2007-2008 school year this accounted for 10% of the students attending school in Colorado. Despite strong partnerships with our parents and community, hiring highly qualified and dedicated staff in our schools, providing state of the art technology in classrooms, engaging in best practice teaching and counseling methods and holding ourselves personally and professionally responsible for preparing all students for a successful future, we have students who drop out of our schools unprepared for the next step in their life’s journey. In the 2006-2007 school year 1,713 students dropped out of our schools, the second highest total of any school district in Colorado.

As a district and community we feel a sense of urgency to combat this problem and have dedicated resources to recover students and prevent the loss of future students. Jeffco Schools’ new Office of Dropout Prevention and Recovery partners with schools, parents, students and community agencies in order to help students be successful in school. Our primary goals are to assist students in returning to school if they have dropped out and to prevent future students from dropping out. It is the mission of the Office of Dropout Prevention and Recovery to start the recovery process within 72 hours of a student being recorded as a dropout. It is our belief that through immediate contact, repairing relationships and student and family advocacy these students will be more likely to reengage in their education.

As a new office we have developed resources to assist us in getting the message out to our school personnel, students, parents and agency partners. We have developed an internal website that provides information about resources in our district, alternative school information nights, best practice strategies and national, state and local data and research. We have also developed a website with commonly asked questions for our communities.

Attached you will see several posters that we have recently created to get the message out. If you have any questions or would like to discuss this work further, we can be contacted at the Office of Dropout Prevention and Recovery at (303) 982-6559, Director, Dave Kollar at (303) 982-6794, Assistant Director, Kenlyn Newman at (303) 982-1301.

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Project Based Learning in Edutopia

Tired of reality, but done with Star Wars? Ready for Utopia? This month I’d like to highlight the resources available from Edutopia, a non-profit group supported by the George Lucas Educational Foundation. Although Edutopia is member-supported, tons of resources are available to non-members on their website. Resources include video and electronic print libraries, an on-line version of their magazine, and teacher training materials that are available to the public, as well as a printed magazine and webinar series available to members.

Edutopia’s theory of what works in public education revolves around six core concepts: Integrated Studies, Comprehensive Assessment, Social and Emotional Learning, Technology Integration, Teacher Development, and the focus here, Project Learning. Each core concept has its own page jammed with links. Project learning is defined as “a dynamic approach to teaching in which students explore real-world problems and challenges, simultaneously developing cross-curriculum skills while working in small collaborative groups.” On the Project Learning page you’ll find videos that answer the “why bother?” and “how-to?” questions, a link to a library of articles where you won’t want to miss “Ten Steps to Better Student Engagement” by Tristan de Frondeville, (also linked on the homepage at the moment), and a two-part teacher training module.

The training module is designed to include group discussion, but nothing says you can not go through the material on your own! Start with part one – a relatively quick trip through four web pages that communicate the fundamentals of Project Learning using text, links to research, PowerPoint presentations and videos. If you like what you see in part one, you can organize a training session in your school using part two. Part two provides guidance on organizing a one or two day session in which participants do the activities included in the training, and learn to design effective projects themselves.

Jodi Heilbrunn, editor

Check out the Education World Grant Center, there are fifteen grant categories you have time to apply for in the 2008-2009 school year.

The School Funding Center has a free newsletter that includes a limited number of grant announcements and grant writing tips. It also advertises a huge database of grants to which you may subscribe for various periods of time for different rates ranging from $99 for two months to $397 for a year. Grants are available for schools and non-profits.

Kids love field trips! Target will award 5,000 Field Trip Grants of up to $800 each during the 2008-2009 school year. Applications are due by November 1, 2008. Check out the rest of the education page on the Target website.

Sign up for education-related e-mail alerts from Grantsalert.com. The website also includes grant-seeking tips, a special page for sources of classroom funding for teachers (called GSFT), and a directory of grant writers to help you. Registering for funding alerts is free, but the grant writers, of course, are not.

Teachers, go to Donors Choose to make requests for classroom supplies.

Find and apply online for competitive grant opportunities from all Federal grant-making agencies.

RGK Foundation - The Foundation's programmatic areas of interest include Health, Education, Human Services, and Community Affairs. The Foundation's primary interests within education include formal K-12 education, literacy, and higher education.

The Dollar General offers annual or bi-annual grants in five literacy areas:
· Adult Literacy Grants
· Back-To-School Grants
· Beyond Words: The Dollar General School Library Relief Program
· Family Literacy Grants
· Youth Literacy Initiatives

Here’s a great webpage that lists endless grant opportunities for K-12 schools, and has a page on grant writing tips! They also offer a subscription to Schoolgrants Biweekly Newsletter for $45 a year.

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American Bar Association’s Legal Center for
Foster Care and Education
This website has more resources than I can possibly describe here. There are succinct tools especially geared for judges, attorneys, caseworkers and educators; special education fact sheets; and longer reports on many topics including the myths of confidentiality laws to lessons learned from state efforts to promote educational stability for children in foster care. There is a listserv called CHILD-EDUCATION to which anyone can subscribe, and much else. A wonderful resource!

The Center for Social and Emotional Education
CSEE’s goal is to promote positive and sustained school climate: a safe, supportive environment that nurtures social and emotional, ethical, and academic skills. CSEE helps schools integrate crucial social and emotional learning with academic instruction, thereby enhancing student performance, preventing drop outs, reducing physical violence and bullying, and developing healthy and positively engaged adults. You can read online The School Climate Challenge: Narrowing the Gap Between School Climate Research and School Climate Policy, Practice Guidelines and Teacher Education Policy. Or you may purchase the more recent School Climate: Research, Policy, Practice, and Teacher Education published in Teachers College Record in January 2009.

Education Law Center of Pennsylvania (ELC)
The ELC is a non-profit legal center that has worked since 1975 to make good public education a reality for Pennsylvania’s most vulnerable children – poor children, children of color, children with disabilities, English language learners, children in foster homes and institutions, and others. ELC’s work falls into three major areas: 1) Making sure that all children have access to school and school programs. 2) Providing families (and those who work with them) reliable, understandable information about education laws and policies. 3) Improving schools. One of the publications on the ELC website is the Educational Aftercare & Reintegration Toolkit for Juvenile Justice Professionals (http://www.elc-pa.org/pubs/pubs_foster.html). It provides probation officers and others the information they need to advocate effectively for children in, or returning from, out-of-home placements. It is a legal manual based specifically on Pennsylvania law, but several sections refer to Federal laws that would apply in all states. It is an excellent model of what could be done anywhere.

Edutopia
Funded by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, Edutopia seeks to promulgate a new way of teaching, more in line with current technology and business needs, focusing on problem solving and team work, rather than memorizing facts.

Models for Change: Systems Reform in Juvenile Justice
This initiative is an effort to create successful and replicable models of juvenile justice system reform through targeted investments in four key states: Illinois, Pennsylvania, Louisiana and Washington. The Education Law Center, described above, is the coordinating agency for the Pennsylvania effort. One of its foci is providing more effective services including educational transitions to youth released from detention, called aftercare in juvenile justice language. Action Networks, devoted to accelerating reform in particular issue areas, are operating in 12 additional states. An interactive map illustrates who is doing what. With long-term funding and support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Models for Change seeks to accelerate progress toward a more rational, fair, effective, and developmentally appropriate juvenile justice system.

21^st Century Schools conducts more workshops and conferences on more topics in more locations that I can possibly include in the Conference section below. Go to their website and pick your next professional development experience.

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K-12 Conference Website: This is an on-line listing for many types of conferences, with K-12 Education Conferences selected as a sub-category.

6^th International Conference on Positive Behavior Support
The Expanding World of PBS: Science, Values and Vision
March 26-28, 2009
Jacksonville, FL
Register by February 23 for the regular rate, or register on-site afterwards at a slightly higher rate. Separate registration for Skill-Building Workshops on March 28 is required. Keynote speaker Rob Horner is the Alumni-Knight endowed professor of special education at the University of Oregon where he directs the Educational and Community Supports research unit.

The Center for Data-Driven Reform in Education

Spring K–12 Leadership Institute

Increasing Student Achievement: Using Data to Lead Change

La Jolla, CA

April 17–18, 2009

During this intense, two-day institute, district and school leaders will join leading educational researchers and practitioners to learn how to recognize, evaluate, and implement the best research-proven programs and practices for their schools. They will see how existing schools have successfully used these same interventions to achieve unprecedented student achievement...and how they can duplicate those same results in their own schools. Keynote speaker Robert E. Slavin, Ph.D. is the director of the Center for Research and Reform in Education at Johns Hopkins University and director of the Institute for Effective Education at the University of York, and Mark T. Rolewski is the director of dissemination for leadership research and the national consultant for the Center for Data-Driven Reform in Education (CDDRE) at Johns Hopkins University. Register by March 17.

American School Counselors Association Annual Conference
Making a Difference
Dallas Convention Center
Dallas, Texas
June 28 – July 1, 2009
This conference will bring together approximately 2,000 pre-kindergarten to post-secondary professional school counselors, counselor educators, supervisors and graduate students. Conference sessions allow attendees to take away solid, practical ideas they can put to work tomorrow, make valuable contacts in the school counseling field and discover the latest techniques in school counseling.
Registration is now open, and by registering before March 1 you qualify for the supersaver rate. You still qualify for a smaller discount by registering before May 1. Keynote speakers Louis Gossett Jr., Harry Wong and Frank Warren.

www.schoolengagement.org

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