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Instead of focusing on an entire school and its overall academic needs,
the Results-based Partnerships project focuses on specific needs and goals
for each school. For example, a school demonstrating deficiencies in its
third grade reading scores may decide to focus partnership efforts on
providing tutors to students having the most difficulty reading, investing
a large percentage of its total volunteer hours in this area.
A high school identified through No Child Left Behind as having an
attendance problem may decide to focus its partnership efforts on
improving attendance at the school. For each specific goal identified by
the partnership, volunteer hours will be tracked and before-and-after test
results, as well as anecdotal information, will be assessed and
accumulated. The goal is to show that, for each X unit of partnership
effort, Y results have taken place, whether the target group of students
is 50 or 350. Even employee volunteer hours will be quantified further, as
time spent on meetings and planning will be tracked separately from direct
contact with students.
This research project will quantify the success of partnership efforts at
a variety of schools. The Alliance fully expects that some efforts may be
significantly more successful than others and that some efforts may fail.
Even for those that are not successful, the Alliance will survey school
and business representatives to determine why their partnership efforts
were not successful, so that these lessons learned can be communicated to
other partnerships across the state. Reasons for failure may include a
lack of commitment by the school and/or the business partner, lack of
resources by the business partner to commit to the project, changes in
school or business leadership or an ambitious goal that is simply too
large for the size of the partnership.
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