Main navigation | Main content
Concurrent sessions are divided into four themed tracks: 1) Stories from Current Check & Connect Implementation Sites, 2) Tips for Implementing Check & Connect, 3) Sustaining Check & Connect, and 4) Research.
Lowana Greensky, Director, Indian Education Services, St. Louis County Schools (ISD #2142)
St. Louis County Schools is not only the largest geographical school district in the state of Minnesota, but also serves American Indian students from three distinct Reservation Communities - Nett Lake and Vermilion, located on the Bois Forte Reservation, and Brookston, on the Fond du Lac Reservation. Through funding from the Department of Indian Education Services, we are in the second year of implementing Check & Connect in our county schools. Please join us in a discussion about the successes and struggles of implementing with fidelity.
Kay A. Augustine, Ed.D., Youth & Adult Engagement Manager, Eastern Carver County Schools, MN
Erin Indrelie Swoboda, Administrative Dean, Chanhassen High School, MN
Stephen Pettinelli, Targeted Services District Coordinator, Burnsville Area Learning Center, MN
Cannot afford to hire mentors? Come learn how Minnesota School districts Eastern Carver County Schools and Eagan, Burnsville, Savage Public Schools are engaging AmeriCorps Promise Fellows, administrators, teachers, and staff to implement Check & Connect in grades K-12. We’ll share the implementation process, structure, funding streams, benefits, impact, and challenges, including strategies for getting everyone board.
David R. Johnson, Ph.D., Birkmaier Professor of Educational Leadership & Director, Institute on Community Integration, University of Minnesota
Efforts to prevent students from dropping out of school require resources. Administrators and staff need good information on the costs as well as the effectiveness of dropout prevention interventions. This information is essential in establishing and sustaining these intervention programs. Accurately assessing the costs of dropout prevention programs can, however, be challenging. This presentation will describe various approaches to calculating program intervention costs based on the "ingredients" and "resource cost model" methods. By focusing on ingredients or resources costs, these approaches begin not with a budget, but rather with the details of the intervention and its resource requirements, thus producing a more accurate understanding of the costs associated with intervention implementation.
James J. Appleton, Ph.D., Director, Office of Research and Evaluation, Gwinnett County Public Schools, GA
Amy L. Reschly, Ph.D., Professor, Department of Educational Psychology, University of Georgia
Student engagement with school is a promising multi-dimensional construct. SEAs and LEAs must be able to efficiently collect, analyze and meaningfully report engagement information if it is to be useful. We describe the Check & Connect-aligned theory of the SEI, practical lessons learned, and results found over an eight year period with nearly 70,000 students per year. We include predictions to high school graduation and post-secondary enrollment.
See also The Student Engagement Instrument on the Check & Connect website.