Must blog!

Haven't blogged here since January, I think! Things got crazy.

At the end of February was the Beyond School Hours conference in Atlanta, which Foundations, Inc. organizes. It was attended by about 1 million people (no, but over A THOUSAND) and was a huge gig. The conference, as you might imagine, spotlights what's going on with education beyond the school day, including after-school and summer programs as well as time at home, but also focuses on how both in-school and out-of-school time can be aligned for the best educational benefit.

A huge conference strand this year was grade level reading, and the part of the conference that I helped organize overlapped with the workshops, presentations, and panels about GLR. I designed a bunch of buttons for everyone to wear, and despite my long hair often concealing the button I pinned to my jacket, people did ask me. I think my response was, "Before grade three, students are learning to read, and after, they're reading to learn. If they can't read by 3rd grade, they're at risk for falling behind forever." And that's not even much of a hyperbole.

The conference went well, the evaluations were mostly positive, and now I'm gearing up for a convening of folks from our different Making Connections sites in Providence, RI in May. The Making Connections initiative is finished this year in June, and because of universal budget cuts and personnel shifts at schools and districts, we'll be talking a lot about what may be a nebulous immediate future for a lot of folks. How can we sustain progress in getting kids to read on grade level in the midst of such change?

One thing we're developing is an "eLearning" site to keep connected virtually, and to provide helpful resources and assistance even beyond the end of Making Connections. One of the many beautiful things about the internet.