This paper examines ideas about school scheduling and student learning. It also offers suggestions for schools that are considering the adoption of alternative school calendars. It describes a case study in which a progressive school district modified its school calendar in order to improve instructional opportunities for student learning. The…

Total Quality Management (TQM) promotes a long-term, strategic look at organizations; by extension, Total Quality Education (TQE) promotes an essential, strategic view of communities, educational provisions, and children. This book discusses applying the TQM approach, which focuses on long-term quality, to a TQE, communitywide focus. The emphasis…

In rural coastal communities, trade-offs between conserving and developing environmentally sensitive resources are acute. At the community level, part-time volunteers and citizen officials are asked to make complex decisions based on ambiguous and frequently contradictory "scientific" evidence of economic and environmental relationships.…

Collaboration as an effective means for developing resiliency in children is examined in this document. The first section summarizes findings of literature on collaboration to develop a new paradigm based on the following features: obtaining community ownership; developing and utilizing people's strengths; and actively engaging children.…

This manual is intended to help rural officials solve community problems. In defining local needs, rural officials should pick a winning issue, enlist community support, make certain of local authority to pursue the project, and build local credibility by demonstrating good government management. Officials can marshall resources by joining forces…

The Office of Educational Leadership (OEL) of the Minnesota State Department of Education initiated a project to develop and examine the effects of processes designed to transform schools into structures that assure that all students learn. In September 1989, 10 Research and Development (R&D) project sites received grants from the OEL. The…

A challenge for the 1990s is the implementation of prevention strategies that strengthen protective factors in families, schools, and communities. Protective factors refer to positive action strategies that build resiliency in youth. After a brief overview of protection factor research, the major protective factors that contribute to the…

Education is important because it directly affects our social quality of life, individual opportunities, national economic competitiveness, and other dimensions of life. Unfortunately, the true value of education is often only recognized by its absence. Although economic competitiveness is only one byproduct of national education quality, it does…

The Take Pride in America (TPIA) school program encourages volunteer stewardship programs to help protect, enhance, and manage public lands such as school sites, forests, parks, water reservoirs, historical sites, fish and wildlife areas, public nature preserves, and wilderness areas in the United States. From this program an educational guide and…

This manual, developed by the Alaska Department of Health and Social Services, is intended to help concerned community members make school health education a reality. It provides suggestions on how to get people organized to take the right steps. The manual's suggestions are based on three statements. First, health education means teaching people…

The manual focuses on the development of a school-level home/school information system to improve communication and understanding of special education programs. A step-by-step plan for developing such a system is addressed in terms of five major topics (sample subtopics in parentheses): basic information gathering (surveys and needs assessment),…

This paper examines the current and future roles of organizations such as education laboratories in serving the changing needs of urban education. Concerns for greater effectiveness in support services stem from the growing need to effectively deal with some of the complex, lingering issues which to data have been only marginally addressed. Urban…

This book contains the results of the 1987 statewide survey on public involvement in South Carolina's education system. It is designed to serve as a resource directory and provides information that interested persons can use to expand partnerships between schools and the public that they serve. Survey results are catalogued in this directory…

In two school districts of the Saanich Penninsula, Native Indian Language programs were initiated in 1979 (Victoria) and 1981 (Saanich). The goal of this evaluation were: (1) to determine the factors which affected the implementation of Native Indian Language programs for dialects of two language families (Wakashan, including Kwak'wala and…

This second volume of a two-volume manual provides a structure for the analysis of the design of cooperative education and the implementation of the design in terms of the 49 key elements of cooperative education. It is intended for use by persons responsible for cooperative education at state and local levels. Volume II is the heart of the…