Two districts in Michigan have been selected by their model providers’ national organizations as 2005 exemplary sites.  The Kaleva Norman Dickson school district was selected as the national conference and visitation site by Susan Kovalik and Associates’ Integrated Thematic Instruction (ITI) program.  A district-level implementation from grades K-12 has been very successful.  ITI’s national conference will be held at nearby Crystal Mountain from April 26-28.

The Gwinn Area Schools have been selected as the first-ever district-level national promising site by Co-NECT.  In the past, only individual schools have been selected for this honor.  Over the past six years, all Gwinn schools have participated in comprehensive school reform through the Co-NECT model.

Adrian McKinley Elementary and Steele Middle School in Muskegon are very proud to have made Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) on the MEAP test for the first time ever in 2004.  They continue to look forward to improved performance for this year.

Evart Middle School and Rudyard Middle School have both published major works of student effort.  At Evart MS, students publish a real school newspaper regularly.  The publisher, Alyson Clark is a fifth grader, while editor, Arianne Prichard, serves as Chief Editor. The paper is very well done and serves as an excellent performance assessment for all newspaper employees.

Students at Rudyard Middle School recently published an anthology of poetry and prose by students, parents and staff.  This publication is covered and bound very attractively for distribution in the community.

Barth Elementary in Romulus, MI has been selected as a “Blue Ribbon School” in our state.  An elaborate application process is followed up by an onsite visit by a team of blue ribbon schools evaluators.   Barth is one of four Romulus schools holding a CSR grant with the Compass Learning model.  The school’s staff and students have experienced great success with their implementation.   

Other schools will be reporting their significant achievements in future updates of this site.