Program Replication History in Schools Across the Nation

With funding from the state legislature, the Minnesota Learning Resource Center (MLRC) was established in 1999. Via this funding, the MLRC proposed to disseminate innovative practices for developing high levels of learning readiness in children in pre-Kindergarten through third grade.

In the fall of 1999, sixteen Minnesota public schools became Designated Learning Sites (DLS), developing partnerships with the MLRC to help underachieving students significantly increase their reading and academic performance.

As more Minnesota schools benefited each year from the MLRC’s training and mentoring, schools around the country requested that they, too, become Designated Learning Sites. As the result of that interest, in the fall of 2001 the MLRC was selected to receive a major grant through the U.S. Department of Education that allowed for program replication in schools across the nation.

As of school year 2004 - 05, the Minnesota Learning Resource Center has worked with 75 public elementary schools and pre-school sites across Minnesota and an additional 94 schools nationwide.

Background

A Chance To Grow (ACTG),  a non-profit agency based in Minneapolis, was established in the mid-1980s to help children challenged by significant brain injury. The agency co-founders and co-directors, Bob and Kathy DeBoer, along with Art Sandler, a Philedelphia Physical Therapist, developed a program to help stimulate the injured brain and produce functional gains.  They eventually joined with Dr. Lyelle Palmer, a Special Education professor from Winona State University, to establish a program called S.M.A.R.T., Stimulating Maturity through Accelerated Readiness Training, to assist children who struggle to learn for any reason.

A Chance To Grow first offered S.M.A.R.T. (formerly called Boost-up) in the mid-1980s as a summer program. In 1987, it expanded to collaborate with the Minneapolis Public Schools on a four-year project to compare the impact of S.M.A.R.T. with that of a traditional transitional kindergarten. Students in this program could not meet the district’s first grade readiness requirements, even through they had already completed a full year of regular kindergarten. During the project, one set of classes spent 93 hours per year in S.M.A.R.T.; the other set received only the regular curriculum. At the end of each year of the project, the S.M.A.R.T. students were reading at the 82nd to 89th percentile of Minneapolis students entering first grade and most of the students in the control classrooms were meeting district’s criteria for entering first grade. Significantly, however, the children who received S.M.A.R.T. maintained their reading gains through second grade, while more than half of the control students were failing again in reading by second grade.

The success of this project led a group of A Chance To Grow parents and staff to found New Visions, which in 1994 became Minnesota’s 11th charter school.

New Visions, a K - 8 school serving 200 mostly inner city students, infused and integrated S.M.A.R.T. into an existing curriculum and involved the children in S.M.A.R.T. exercises on a daily basis. Research during those early years demonstrated that all children in the primary grades, from those who struggle to those who are at or beyond grade level, benefit from the S.M.A.R.T. program.

By implementing ACTG's years of experience into the school setting, it was determined that early elementary aged students who complete at least 80 hours in the S.M.A.R.T. program gain six to eight months in reading skills. New Visions students make, on average, annual reading gains of one year and several months with no difference in race, gender or culture.

Today, in addition to the S.M.A.R.T. program, two others, Hemisphere Specific Auditory Stimulation (HSAS) and Audio Visual Entrainment, (AVE) are used with students with more specific developmental issues. HSAS, an intervention using individually formatted audio tapes based on a child's audiogram, focuses on those students who have auditory processing challenges. The tapes are created to highlight frequencies in order to allow the child to receive and retain information in an organized and efficient manner. AVE is designed to assist children who are unable to attend in the classroom. After about 30 - 50 sessions using a computerized program of light and sound stimulation, a child's brain learns to be relaxed and focused, putting it into the optimum learning state. Many children are able to reduce or eliminate medications for hyperactivity, inattention and anxiety after completing this intervention.