College and Career Readiness Grant

The proposed project will focus on the development and implementation of a monitored intervention for students in school districts located in the Kentucky River Area Development District region. Additionally, this project will help schools and districts improve their college and career readiness rates (CCRR) by focusing on several of the strategies identified by the Kentucky Department of Education (KDE, 2011): collection and use of data, targeted intervention, career readiness definition, and innovative pthways to student success as well as instructional alignment between high school and postsecondary education. This will be accomplished through the development of a regional Instructional Alignment Team (IAT) The IAT will meet on a monthly basis throughout the term of the grant award (January to December 2012) to address issues related to college and career readiness. The work of the IAT will begin with an initial face-to-face meeting that will focus on an overview of college and career readiness data for each of the participating counties and how this local data compares to state level averages. Following this initial session, members of the IAT will meet monthly (February to May) in a virtual space using Adobe Connect Pro. During these online sessions, the IAT will drill down and explore the data related to specific discipline areas to develop an acute understanding of specific college readiness issues for students within the region and identify gaps in knowledge or areas of weakness in English, mathematics, reading, and science. During the summer months (June and July 2012), the IAT will meet face to face to develop instructional interventions that address the gaps in content knowledge and/or areas of weakness identified during the data exploration activities. The summer sessions will include a train the trainer workshop to develop local Instructional Alignment Teams in each district. During the start of the new academic year (August to November 2012), the instructional interventions will be implemented across educational settings, including high school, college level, and adult education classrooms. The final month of the project (December 2012) will focus on a project evaluation as well as scalability and sustainability efforts.