What are the issues?
Educators have intuitively known for years how important a child’s early years were to future learning and success in life. It goes without saying that some of the most important skills that a child needs to learn during this period of time deal with language literacy. We now know, through modern research techniques, that literacy is a developmental process.
Literacy development begins at conception and continues through fetal growth and maturity, into infancy, childhood, preadolescence, adolescence, and adulthood. It is, indeed, a life-long learning process which in itself is basic to the process of life-long learning. Educational systems must focus on this process using what is known (and is being learned each day) about how this intricate, complex, human behavior is mastered.
Until recently, efforts to examine this uniquely human phenomenon were limited to externally studying literacy related behavior with the hope of somehow 'intuiting' what was going on inside the mind of the learner. Many of those 'educated guesses' were on target...many were not. Technological accomplishments in imaging techniques over the last 10 years or so have made it possible to begin to remove some of the guesswork from educators’ efforts to understand how humans grow and develop in general, and acquire literacy in particular.
Over recent years the imaging processes of MRI and PET scan have given growth and development specialists and literacy development researchers a whole new way of looking at the center of this development - the brain. What has resulted is a veritable revolution in what is known about how the three-pint, three-pound, multi-function processor actually does what it does...including acquiring literacy.
Keeping in mind that what is known about brain development and literacy acquisition is just beginning to grow, it is safe to say that we now have some pretty significant ideas to work with in thinking about exactly how, beginning with early cellular clusters through language competence, the brain goes about becoming literate. Some of the most important of those ideas are:
1. The fetus begins literacy acquisition while in the womb. In addition to careful prenatal care, mothers-to-be need to be exposed to lots of language in many different environments prior to their child's birth. The fetus can, and does, hear and learn from these experiences.
2. Experience is the key stimulant for literacy. The wider and more in-depth the life experiences of the child, the wider and more in-depth will be the ability of the brain to internalize, acquire and use literacy.
3. The brain is a parallel processor and, as such, prefers multi-sensory activities and experiences which it can use to develop alternate pathways for dealing with literacy acquisition. The child must "do" language in lots of different settings for lots of different purposes to accomplish a variety of different real-life tasks.
School programs which set literacy development and acquisition as their top priority must make certain that their programs are based on the latest available neurological data; have teachers who are trained and knowledgeable in how the brain develops and how to translate that into classroom activity; and are leading parents (and the community in general) to a better understanding of the importance of home and community environment on the development of the child.
The importance of these recent findings was emphasized earlier this year at the April 17th "White House Conference on Early Childhood Development and Learning: What New Research on the Brain Tells Us about Our Youngest Children".
At that conference Dr. Carla Shatz of the University of California, Berkeley spoke of how the brain is dynamically wiring itself as the child grows. She related that the wiring of neuron connections takes place at a staggering rate in the first months of life and doesn’t slow down for years to come.
Also presenting was Dr. Deborah Phillips of the Institute of Medicine, Washington, DC who spoke about the importance of the early care giver’s role in providing a stimulating environment for the child and how unfortunate it is that we don’t pay and train child care workers better.
What does all of this mean for our educational system?
It means that, more than ever, we need to be concerned about the environment and stimulation that a child receives in the formative years. It means that we have to develop strategies for dealing with the brain damaging effect of "crack babies" on our teaching process. And it means that we need made more aware of "brain building activities" as we develop our elementary and preschool curriculum.
Rationale and Vision
How can technology address the consequences of this knowledge?
It is no coincidence that technology can not only provide the research on what should be done, but also help provide the solutions. We envision several areas in which this would take place:
Why is Coweta County the place to fund such a project?
We have a history of innovation that lends itself towards trying some of the new strategies suggested in our proposal. Some recent examples are:
Coweta County was awarded a Next Generation Schools Grant in 1994 and it was recently announced that it has again been awarded a grant for 1997. The goals of our 1997 grant support many of the same objectives as this proposal, and which are also in line with our long range technology and curriculum goals. The goals in this grant were not "made up" for the purpose of applying for the funding, but rather focus on some of those already in place and being implemented.
We have been involved in a curriculum alignment project for almost two years now and have completed alignment efforts in language arts, reading, math and PE We feel this will make a significant impact on our ability to teach and monitor student progress through the required curriculum objectives for all students in grades PK-12.
This past school year we implemented the 2nd year-round school in the state at Newnan Crossing Elementary. We feel that this alternative calendar will make a big difference in student achievement in years to come.
Every system thinks to some degree or another that they have excellent staff employed, and we are no exception. It is reinforcing to have that feeling recognized externally, however, and we are proud of the fact that over that last 5 years, 2 State Teachers of the Year, including the current, have come from Coweta County. One of those is employed as a lead teacher at one of the project schools.
We are benefiting from a number of productive community partnerships and the resources they bring. An outstanding example is the partnership group, the Coweta Association for the Advancement of Technology (CAAT). Some accomplishments of that organization have been:
With the help of such partners as Newnan Water and Light, the school system has build a wide-area fiber optic network which is almost near completion. Due to very generious donations of time and materials by several partners involved, little resources were required by the system to accompish this.
An outcome of a partnership between CAAT and its sister group the West Georgia Telecommunications Alliance (WGTA), based in Carrollton, is a sharing of network resources that allows Coweta County’s T1 PeachNet connection to originate at the University of West Georgia in Carrollton and transverse four interconnected Intranets in order to feed the school system’s wide area network with an Internet connection.
The CAAT group also supported West Georgia RESA’s Model Technology Grant (largest awarded in Georgia), in which Coweta County has a project school doing distance learning activities over a multi-county fiber optic network.
As part of Newnan Water and Light’s entrance into the cable TV business, the school system has received a dedicated cable TV channel and access to that company’s production facilities.
Another reason Coweta County is in a state of readiness to go forward with this grant is seen in the commitment by the board of education to support technology staffing. The central-office-based Department of Technical Support currently has 7 technicians and 2 system-wide Curriculum/Technology Coordinators devoted to supporting technology at all system locations. In addition, 7 departmental technicians are itinerant and based in elementary schools. Also, currently being hired for next year, are 10 new Curriculum/Technology Specialists who will be itinerant and school-based as well. In all, with other support staff, 28 people are employed in the department to support technology use in all its phases. There is no other system our size in the state that is staffed for technology support at this committed a level.
In summary, then, we are in a definite state of readiness to implement the goals of our proposal.
Project Overview
The goals of this proposal fit well into the long range curriculum and technology plans for our system that are already in place. And even though we knew that our system-wide "at-risk" figures wouldn’t earn us any bonus points in the award process, we do feel that the priorities we have chosen for implementing our system goals are consistent with the intent of focusing on the target groups specified in the grant.
We, therefore, looked at system-wide data to see which schools would fit best into the three "at-risk" criterion. Some of the proposed data elements used in the project are:
After analysis of the statistical trends, focus groups for the project were chosen to be students in grades PK-2 in our three school-wide Title I schools: Newnan Crossing Elementary, Atkinson Elementary and Ruth Hill Elementary.
Examples of the type data that led us to choose this cluster grouping can be found in the 1995-96 DOE report card:
| Data | Atkinson | Newnan Crossing | Ruth Hill | System | State |
| Percent free/reduced lunch | 51.6% | 80.6% | 63.2% | 31.1% | 43.4% |
| Percent Title 1 reading | 29% | 31% | 25% | 7% | 11.8% |
| Percent Remedial Education | 36% | 33% | 35% | 16% | 17.4% |
| Percent Special Education | 15% | 17% | 13% | 12% | 10.2% |
| Percent SIA | 18% | 15% | 37% | 7% | 18.5% |
| ITBS Grade 3 reading percentile | 40 | 20 | 27 | 46 | 51 |
| ITBS Grade 5 reading percentile | 45 | 45 | 44 | 54 | 53 |
Another group that will play a significant role and be included in training and implementation will be private pre-K providers. Parental contact and involvement through technology plays a major role as well.