An ethnographic study examined school-community relationship and its effect on program implementation in six rural South Dakota towns serving as sites for the South Dakota Head Start/Public School Transition Demonstration Project (SDTP). SDTP is part of a national project to test whether providing continuous comprehensive services to Head Start…

What happened in the small farm community of Elk Point, South Dakota, on January 8, 1986, was unimaginable--a father shot his family and then walked to work and shot himself. Upon learning of the murder/suicide, the Elk Point School District faced the difficult questions of what teachers should say to students, how the district should deal with…

This report describes an educational partnership between South Dakota State University and Capital University Center, Inc. (CUC), (Pierre, South Dakota). CUC is a nonprofit organization founded in 1982 to provide access to higher education for residents of rural central South Dakota. CUC contracts with South Dakota State University for educational…

The South Dakota Alliance for Transition establishes a formal partnership among state agencies, local service providers, and community stakeholders to address the transition needs of youth with disabilities. The 5-year federally funded project aims to enhance transition services through systems change: developing responsive case management and…

Community education programs in rural areas come up against a different set of problems than their counterparts in urban areas. These problems seem to cluster into three categories: communication, the "so what phenomenon," and the form or substance of the idea. Observations of programs in South Dakota suggest that some characteristics…

Perhaps responding to a new awareness of the problems of American Indians, South Dakota Governor George Mickelson issued an executive proclamation declaring 1990 the "Year of Reconciliation." Dakota Wesleyan University responded to this proclamation by participating with the Mitchell Area Vocational-Technical in establishing a…

The changes in what people with developmental disabilities wanted and got for living and daytime settings in South Dakota and Wyoming during 1988 were compared to what they wanted and received in 2000. Although the percentage of people in their desired setting rose, there were substantial changes in the types of settings recommended over the…

A database was assembled from data collected on all people served by the Developmental Disabilities divisions of Nebraska, South Dakota, and Wyoming, including state institutions and state-funded programs (n=5,928). Information included provider expenditures associated with each individual, allocations made by individual reimbursement rates,…

This report discusses the outcomes of a South Dakota project designed to develop and validate a natural support system involving typical co-workers providing on the job training and support to individuals with disabilities. The Co-Worker Mentoring in Supported Employment (CMSE) project had the following outcomes: (1) job development activities…

Any conclusions that community education concepts are "alive and well" were not supported in a study of the impact of state education policies on rural school districts with total enrollments of 350 students or less in the Great Plains Region (Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, Colorado, Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota). Survey…