MS. CHINNIA: That’s a hard act to follow, however, since this is the third generation of trials that, and really the partnership that we’ve had with Shep and his crew of people that he’s described to you I want to just share why Baltimore City Public School system would even want to be involved in something like this. As was mentioned this is prevention research and is taking place in schools there are some really key factors that as school personnel we were very considerate of. First of all that we are developing programs that really are aimed at front loading and maintaining achievement of students, as was mentioned with the earlier studies and the findings in terms of the impact of first grade instruction and what it meant to those children even up to ages 21 to 25. Looking at identifying the best practices for instruction earlier was mentioned, some of the impact of No Child Left Behind, I know in the state of Maryland as we’re looking at strategies to begin to address achievement gaps in the different cohorts of children from our state testing we need to find programs and strategies that are evidence based programs. And so we’re looking for the kind of rigorous study that takes place to help us to show what’s effective, then examining the effectiveness of those programs in actual classroom settings. And I think key for Baltimore City in continuing with this is looking at ways of sustaining these practices so that they do in fact become integral parts of our master plan and we’re not dependent on researchers or grants coming to provide that but that it becomes a part of our regular program. Next slide.

However, this type of research is some ways intrusive and can cause some problems because we’re investigating families, we’re looking at the way teachers are working in classrooms. There was mention earlier about the teacher unions and so you need to have some good friends and partners there. Looking at the relationships between teachers and parents, the whole idea of peer groups. And then not only is it intrusive but it changes in some ways the normal operations of the school. With our particular partnership we’re looking at things such as changing the way we assigned classes. It has been the purview of the principal to make assignments working with teachers as to which children need to be with which teachers for first grade. We randomly assigned all of our teachers for first grade in these 12 schools, we randomly assigned all of our students. So we not only had to convince the teachers that this was worthwhile but then also in talking with parents and the community. And I should say and the principals probably also first.

In order to do this type of research, especially with the random trials, it’s important that we have very strong partnerships, and what I think is unique to the generations that we have been implementing has been just that. Not only do we have partnerships within the school system but also with the community at large. We have taken the time, and this is a multi year type of activity, this is not something that was decided last year and we’re implementing this year, some of this has been two to three years out in terms of planning. We’ve taken the time to be certain that we have shared valued, that there’s mutual respect between the school system, our community partners, and our research partners, and that we’ve built the support system and plans for everything that we would like to do. Next slide.

The model, and I’m really sharing the model that Shep uses, you can just click them all on if you don’t mind, and I’m going to highlight several of them. There’s six I think important components, first is to analyze the structure of our system so there was, and we are like most large urban systems, we’ve probably had six superintendents and/or CEO’s in the time that we’ve been going through this partnerships. Learning the vision, understanding what the challenges and priorities are, identifying things that would be mutual self interest, I think Shep alluded to the need that he had in coming from his area in terms of finding out things about in terms of health, that really were mutually important to us in terms of the education and the connection there. In fitting the research into the vision of our leadership, in actually having oversight committee that was made up of all of the partners involved, and in working through trust issues. And I’d just like to highlight a couple of them for you.

The first is analyzing the social and political structure. We did take time in meeting with our school board, our superintendent, and the community to be certain that everyone had the shared vision, that we had set the priorities, that we had looked at what the program might be, that we had set up lines of communication, that we had widespread endorsement of what we wanted to do and that everyone knew that our final goal was to institutionalize this. You will see on the next slide the list of the institutional board, and I’m just showing this to you to just let you see the wide range of people in the Baltimore community that are supportive of this partnership that we have. And if we can move on, in ensuring that our vision, this is in our master plan. I just mentioned this morning that last night our board was reviewing the third revision of the master plan and I wanted to assure Shep and Gene that indeed whole day first grade is still listed in objective one, with portions in objective four and five which deal with parents and the management. But the goal is around improving student achievement.

In that we have also been made certain that we have gotten the support of all of the leadership across our system, and I’m going to actually skip the next slide, if you can go to two, and it’s done in I think a very unique way. This partnership has what we call a schools committee, and the schools committee meets regularly, it is made up of the principals of the 20 schools involved in the research programs, both the development schools and the trial schools. The principals from these schools meet with the area academic officers, with the prevention program staff, with staff members from our curriculum instruction office and our superintendents office, and in fact become co-researchers and co-program developers. And what was originally brought to us I can say very clearly has been reshaped by the discussions that have taken place in the schools committee.

This has become valuable professional development for our administrators, however at this point the schools committee has broken into several other committees and I think that’s been powerful with this generation in that our teachers meet, the teachers who are in the trial schools who will be implementing the program, but we also meet with the teachers in the trial schools who will not be implementing the whole day program so that they’re understanding the importance of the rigor of what is going to happen in those classrooms that are going to use the special interventions. And because they understand that I think that will help with the internal controls in terms of being certain that we do have good data that comes out. Of course there’s a promise to all of them, including the teachers in the development schools, in that if this is effective they already know the plan, that four years out they will get the same kinds of things happening.

The last one I wanted to discuss has to do with this whole issue around trust and it’s not only the trust that I’ve mentioned so far within the school but also the trust within the community. We started talking with parents of kindergarten students last spring about what would happen when their children became first graders. We got the initial understanding of the program so that now we are in the process of getting parents to do the signed consent. An example that I would give just as being a principal in one of the previous generations was in selecting that parent/community liaison who actually was a person who was a community advocate, a person who worked in the community, she was an organizer. Because she was well trusted and helped us to explain the program, to bring parents in, to go to homes, we did end up with 100 percent consent, and again, it had to do with the building of the trust and selecting the right personnel to work.

Finally I would just indicate that in terms of doing this type of research in the setting of schools that partnerships are the critical piece to the success of those, and I’ll just show you the structure for our complete partnership in terms of within our school system. There are regular meetings with everyone that you see on this particular organizational chart.

Thank you.