April 2006

Title One Schools Now Achieving at Similar Levels to Non-Title Schools in Huron, SD

Dear Nancy...I have been so appreciative of how our district has been able to benefit from the training opportunities provided in Huron and in Minneapolis these past few years. The on site consultation/coaching that A Chance to Grow/New Visions Academy has been such a strong model for introducing our people and supporting them in the implementation (as well as maintaining) the strategies we have gained from everyone at A Chance to Grow. It has been such a positive experience for our staff to read in a Newsweek magazine, an educational publication (e.g., "Education Week"), or to flip to a television documentary (e.g., local news editorial, 60 Minutes) about the very things we have heard about "ahead of time" from your people. Learning about how we could help students to be better prepared to learn through more stimulation of the neurological system by using S.M.A.R.T./Boost Up activities was our first big step, but the addition of the HSAS (Hemisphere Specific Auditory Stimulation) and AVE (Audio-Visual Entrainment) pieces have put our students (that have struggled in the past) to a level of success they may have never realized without your help. Our people who have been trained and have received the support from the onsite consultations have become real believers in what this can and does do for students in their classrooms. The additional pieces we are continuing to pursue [e.g., importance of nutrition in preparing better learners, Athena Oden's READY BODIES/READY MINDS (how reflex integration improves student behaviors/learning), the pieces from Garth Christiansen's visual training techniques] , thanks to your support, are being researched by our people and integrated into our school district as we move forward. You have made us believers in realizing we can do things differently and take risks in helping our students... you truly have helped us be on the cutting edge of what can be done to help students individually and as whole classes to improve the learning potential. The most recent Stanford Achievement Test results substantiate what many of us were hoping we would start to see from "the data" this year...for the first time our third graders in our Title I schools are now achieving at similar levels to our non-Title schools in all areas of curriculum assessed. What's important to realize is that this is the first group of students to reach third grade who had participated in S.M.A.R.T./Boost Up. The AVE and HSAS data is more specific in that it is related to individual student growth and was comparing the growth of their peers as a group...but that data is just as revealing in terms of what's happening for the students of our district. Thanks to everyone at A Chance to Grow.

W. Bruce Willer, Ed.D.
Director of Special Services