The following resource is an impact story of how NCSI built the capacity of Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) to design a state system of support to begin addressing the special education teacher shortage. The resource provides context for the intensive technical assistance focusing on improvement science, provides qualitative and…

Purpose/Objectives: School Food Focus (Focus) developed the Focus Midwest project on the premise that school food professionals (SFPs) could work together to minimize effort and maximize potential to find new or improved products to serve. Focus designed this project as an experiment to explore how and to what extent this collaborative approach…

With many cities showing an interest in afterschool system building and research providing a growing body of useful information, this Wallace Perspective offers a digest of the latest thinking on how to build and sustain an afterschool system, and the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead for this promising work. The report (a follow-up to a…

Communities of practice (COPs) are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better through interacting with one another (Wenger 1998). Communities of practice have enormous potential to support and sustain quality care and education within a community and, in fact, are doing so. Businesses and…

The 1979 Displaced Homemakers Conference focused on developing awareness of services available from various Illinois agencies to displaced homemakers, generating the spirit and means for cooperative relationships among agencies serving them, and offering prototypes of how women's centers are attempting to coordinate the various services of state…

Describes a cooperative program between small school districts in Grundy County to provide ideas, techniques, and resources to implement career education. Program activities described include teacher in-service sessions, the cooperative resource library, a newsletter, a resource guide, special projects, and a one-and five-year vocational plan. (TA)

Two resource centers were funded by the Illinois Alcoholism Prevention Initiative to facilitate primary prevention and health promotion efforts at the local level. Located in DeKalb and Springfield, the centers assisted the Illinois State Department of Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities Division of Alcoholism in building a body of…

The purpose of this project was to develop an articulation model which can be adopted by any school system in Illinois. The objectives were to field test and evaluate the Project MAVE (Model for Articulated Vocational Education) Articulation Model(s) in various educational settings and to refine the model(s). There were seven implementation…

Project MAVE (Model for Articulated Vocational Education) was initiated to provide curriculum and program sequencing and continuity to students progressing from elementary to secondary to community college levels. Information gathered from surveys, interviews, site visitations, conferences, and literature review led to the conclusion that…

These proceedings consist of papers presented at a conference devoted to educational resource sharing. Included in the volume are the following papers: "Educational Resource Sharing: The Challenge for Illinois" by Lewis D. Patterson; "Resource Sharing: The Test Is Yet to Come," by John W. Huther; "A Response to the…