Background: School settings offer an opportunity to impact student health and wellness. Quality wellness policies are important in establishing strong wellness environments, but current resources to support policy development, maintenance, and dissemination are lacking. The Building Healthy Schools Program aimed to develop capacity of school…

Pennsylvania began scaling up high-fidelity implementation of SchoolWide Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (SWPBIS) in 2006-2007 due to converging regulatory, legal, ethical, and practical influences. The Pennsylvania Community of Practice on School-Based Behavioral Health adopted Algozzine et al.'s (2010) blueprint to describe and…

Quality Rating Improvement Systems (QRISs) commonly offer on-site technical assistance (TA) and coaching to help early care and education settings achieve quality improvements and a higher QRIS rating. In surveys of administrators overseeing statewide QRISs, almost all states reported the use of on-site TA and coaching in both center-based and…

Response to intervention (RTI) can be both a system for providing early interventions to struggling students and a special education diagnostic tool for evaluating and identifying students with specific learning disabilities. Contributing to the very limited literature on state-level approaches, this report describes how nine states define and…

Regional Educational Service Agencies (RESAs)--agencies between the state and local level--are an important resource for helping local educators cope with a variety of pressures from an increasingly complex environment. They do so by performing two functions. Political linkage provides knowledge about the impacts of mandates on specific districts…

The National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) documents dimensions of quality in undergraduate education and provides information and assistance to colleges, universities, and other organizations to improve student learning. Its primary activity is annually surveying college students to assess the extent to which they engage in educational…

To learn more about the Regional Educational Service Agencies (RESA), Research for Better Schools initiated a multi-year study of RESAs in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. This report specifically describes local educators' perceptions about RESA services and the content areas in which RESAs offered help. It also suggests how successful service…

The National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) documents dimensions of quality in undergraduate education and provides information and assistance to colleges, universities, and other organizations to improve student learning. Its primary activity is annually surveying college students to assess the extent to which they engage in educational…

The intent of the second-year project was to (1) provide inservice training in competencies needed by vocational teachers to teach special needs students, (2) field test teachers' modules developed by the University of Pittsburgh, (3) establish the need and mode of delivery of vocational special needs inservice, and (4) develop a system of…