To assist school districts, this document presents the guidelines and evaluation methods used by the New York State Education Department (SED) to identify and validate exemplary school district practices that can be adopted by other districts. The handbook integrates the three phases of the validation process, comprising the district's preparation of the application for validation, the SED's preliminary review of the application, and the visit of an SED validation team to the program site. After several introductory sections reviewing the validation process, the document provides tips and guidelines for preparing an application and discusses the application's cover sheets, the program summary, the program narrative, and the information needed by other districts to adopt the program. SED's preliminary review of the application, and the guidelines and rating scales it uses, are described in the following section. The next ten brief sections cover the validation team visit, including the district's preparations, the visit process, the team report, and appeal procedures. Five appendices present copies of forms for the validation application's cover sheets, the preliminary review's rating form, the validation team's report and evaluation of the preliminary review, and a model application, review, and validation team report. (Author/RW)