For the past eight years, Midwest Educational Research Consortium (MERC), located at Western Michigan University, received two multi-million dollar grants through a U.S. Department of Education program entitled Gaining Early Awareness and Undergraduate Programs (GEAR UP). GEAR UP is a school/university partnership using a cohort model with the goal of increasing the number of students of poverty who graduate from high school and go on to postsecondary education. The MERC/GEAR UP project partners with two universities, two community colleges, and four school districts in Michigan and Ohio. Over the eight years of project funding, MERC/GEAR UP personnel have employed a number of successful strategies and interventions within the GEAR UP project schools. While many of these programs provided services to students and their families as well as their teachers, the most compelling of these programs has been the academic case management program. The case management process provides a network of positive support to help middle school students in low-income, urban settings with the challenges and barriers in their lives. The proposed academic case manager intervention focuses on two specific features: (1) facilitating students completing classroom assignments and (2) understanding the context of students' lives outside of school and using this understanding as a vehicle for developing specific interventions to help students relate to their school concerns. This model is premised on the idea that well-planned practical case manager interventions focusing on these two key features is essential toward overcoming the significant obstacles created by the gap between the school and community environments. The purpose of this study documents the effectiveness of this intervention within a formal CIPP (Stufflebeam, 1983, 2003) evaluation framework. (Contains 3 tables and 2 figures.)