Noting the renewed attention given to community efforts supporting after-school activities to promote social competence in its youth, this book examines the concepts of play and rites of passage for youth. The book also discusses the contributions of various types of activities on youth social competency, presents a variety of perspectives for…

Noting that the focus of early intervention has expanded to include family-oriented programs and services, this report proposes a framework for evaluating outcomes for families. The framework is offered as a vehicle for further discussion and is based on current values, theories, and models of family functioning, and relationships between families…

This annual report details the accomplishments of the Alaska Head Start Program for fiscal year 1999. The report begins with a description of the Head Start program and its core values, and delineates the administrative and program partners of Head Start, its service population, eligibility requirements, funding sources, service models, and…

This paper provides an overview of Houghton Mifflin's Invitations to Literacy, a commercially published, integrated reading/language arts program for use in K-6 classrooms. The program provides instructional resources that seek to: build on the foundation that students bring to school and foster home-school cooperation; hold all students to the…

The report discusses the findings of a study on the reading and writing demands of college-level courses at Maryland's Charles County Community College (College of Southern Maryland as of July 1, 2000). The Language and Literature Department wanted to determine whether its developmental courses were actually preparing students for the reading and…

This document is comprised of two papers providing resources for after-school programs and additional information available from the Harvard Family Research Project (HFRP). The first paper, "Organizations in Out-of-School Time: An Introduction," reviews the national, state, and local organizations active in the field of out-of-school time, grouped…

This report describes the current status of the Summer Food Service Program (SFSP) and the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) (referred to in combination as the Summer Nutrition Programs), federal entitlement programs providing support for state and local efforts to offer low-income children nutritious summer meals and snacks during supervised…

This manual is designed to assist public libraries in Alabama with setting up "Tsunami Summer!," a summer program for young adults, i.e., students in grades 6 through 12. The manual contains the following sections: (1) Publicity and Promotion; (2) Working with Schools; (3) Involving the Students, including teen volunteers, teen advisory…

This paper presents findings of a study that examined the extent to which children's mental health agencies can meet the information needs they consider to be most important and also comply with recommended standards of the Mental Health Statistics Improvement Projects (MHSIP). Three children's data sets representing three different agency…

The second year evaluation of Georgia's Reading First Program primarily addresses the question of the program's effect on students' reading achievement. How schools implemented Reading First is also discussed. The results from the evaluation are, for the most part, positive and support the continuation of the program. The achievement data…

This document outlines the goals and structure of the Direct Care Workers Program (DCWP) sponsored by the Borough of Manhattan Community College (New York). The program targeted bilingual students with poor academic experience living in New York City and offered 6 months of bilingual vocational training as paraprofessionals in the field of Mental…

This document is the first report on an evaluation of the Parents as First Teachers Programme (PAFT) in New Zealand, an established parent education and support service for parents of children birth to age three. This preliminary report details the findings of an analysis of a family exit survey completed by 400 families participating in PAFT.…

In response to concerns that Title I, the largest source of federal funding for education, was not significantly improving the educational achievement of at-risk students, Congress, in 1994, mandated major changes, including changes to the ways in which states measure student performance. This report provides a snapshot of how close states had…

This report documents the evaluation of selected Portland, Oregon, Public Schools elementary and middle school literacy instructional programs and professional development models in 2000-2001. The literacy evolution examined the use of four reading intervention programs and professional development models as well as district adoptions of publisher…

The President's New Freedom Commission on Mental Health solicited public comment from stakeholders in the mental health community on various topics related to the Commissions mission. The goal was to gain a better understanding of the publics experiences with, concerns about, and hopes for the mental health care system. More than twelve hundred…