The Pennyrile Education Services Model Plan was developed to meet the literacy and basic skills needs of undereducated adults living in a predominantly rural, 10-county region of Kentucky known as Pennyrile. The model plan includes the establishment of eight education services centers, beginning with a center in Madisonville that serves…

A junior high/middle school science improvement project established by the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Fairleigh Dickinson University is described in this report. Among project goals are: to improve teacher skills and qualifications in science teaching and offer access to instructional resources; to eliminate teacher isolation; and to…

Project PRIDE, a regional model for providing educational services to severely/profoundly handicapped school-aged individuals in rural southeastern Kansas, was designed to develop exemplary services in multiple special education cooperatives using a regional resource team approach. Resource team members served as consultants to classroom personnel…

Six workshops for nurse educators and school nurses were conducted to build consensus between the two groups and thereby enable both groups to work together to improve nursing education programs' ability to prepare graduates for practice as school nurses. Sixty-two school nurses and 69 nurse educators from 14 southern states attended the…

Through their visits and conversations with students, teachers, and administrators involved in the Appalachian Rural Systemic Initiative (ARSI) over the past decade, the people at Inverness Research Associates came to believe that ARSI served as an important leadership capacity-building effort for improving mathematics and science education in…

The mission of the Appalachian Rural Systemic Initiative (ARSI) was to build a long-term capacity that would improve the educational structures of the rural communities it served. The major strategy ARSI used to create improvement communities across Appalachia was to identify, embrace and educate individual teachers, who became ARSI Teacher…

In Kentucky, one of the six participating Appalachian Rural Systemic Initiative (ARSI) states, the Teacher Partner concept soon gave rise to the Regional Teacher Partners (RTPs). This complementary project, known as the "Master Teacher Project," was designed after the Teacher Partner model but with one key difference. This paper…

This is the story of Barbara Shoemaker and her work as an Appalachian Rural Systemic Initiative (ARSI) Teacher Partner in Oneida, Tennessee. It is the story of what she values and the experiences that shaped her approach to education. In particular it is about what she learned from her experience with the Appalachian Rural Systemic Initiative, and…

Many of the people who live in Knott County today are direct descendants of the early settlers of the region. Today the people of Knott County share an identity that is grounded in the place they and their ancestors called home. Perhaps the public endeavor in which the influence of place is most evident is education. In Knott County education has…