With support from the Los Angeles Annenberg Metropolitan Project (LAAMP), these schools have joined together to present a more effective and seamless K-12 educational experience for all the students in their community. This structure is called a School Family.
     Located in the west San Fernando Valley, the Taft School Family is comprised of over 6,400 students from across the city of Los Angeles. In addition to neighborhood children, traveling students come to us through various permits and open enrollment. Over half (52%) of our students are White, 28% are Hispanic, 12% are Black, 6% are Asian and 2% are other. Almost 15% of our students are English Language Learners (formerly known as Limited English Proficient), with the predominant languages being Spanish and Farsi. Over 27% of our students are in the Federal Free and Reduced Meal Program.

                             Overview of Family Focus Areas and Goals

    While our students come from a variety of backgrounds and have various needs, communication skills are important to all students. As a School Family, we are focused on raising the reading levels of students, particularly among students reading below grade level.
    Our strategies to bring all students to reading at grade level or above incorporates District/State standards as well as the District and LAAMP reform goals. In addition to grant resources, we are leveraging outside funds including cluster funds and parent organization support to achieve our goals.

                                                    What we've done

Safety Nets for Struggling Readers

    To be successful, our work in the classroom must reach all students. To ensure that no student slips through the cracks, students who score below grade level are targeted for participation in intervention programs. In elementary schools, approximately 160 Kindergarten and 1st grade students participated in a six-week Summer School. Students received focused instruction in phonemic awareness and other basic reading skills. Parents of students in the program were asked to sign a contract, solidifying their commitment to helping their child benefit from this program. For our high school students, we targeted 9th grade students reading at least two years below grade level. Approximately 120 of these students participated in the Reading Lab for fifty minutes a day using Reading Plus, a computerized reading assessment program, to improve their reading skills.

Summer Vacation is an Ideal Time for Reading

    The momentum that we have built throughout the school year grinds to a halt with the onset of summer. As a result, teachers often need to spend a portion of the fall semester bringing students "up to speed," resulting in less time to teach grade-level curriculum. To address this problem, our Family distributes a reading list to students and their parents at the end of the school year. The list provides suggestions for elementary and middle school students to read over the summer. For high school students, reading at least one book over the summer is mandatory. We test returning high school students on the book they have read. While small in scale, these projects keep us focused on our Family goal of literacy.

Providing the Best in Literacy Training

    High Levels of student reading achievement are the result of high levels of teacher preparation and expertise. To help our teachers, we held two Family-wide training days centered on specific strategies to increase student reading comprehension as well as tips on using technology to promote literacy. Building on this training, we held our largest Family-wide K-12 professional development day to date in September 1999. Instructors received direct training from reading experts in identifying and assisting struggling students as well as information on mentoring and academy programs linked to literacy. With over 350 participants, the day-long training provided an opportunity for teachers and administrators to work with peers from different schools and grade levels. Teachers left the day excited about working together to improve student achievement.

Providing Schools with Books and Other Resources

    For the past few years we have provided all teachers with funds to augment their own classroom libraries. Last year, we took this a step further, providing grant money for Reading Counts, an interactive reading program in our school libraries, along with two computers, a printer, and shelves for books to accompany the program. This will allow students to select appropriate books and will give them an immediate assessment of their reading comprehension. It also will give our teachers another valuable tool with which to track student progress.

Getting the Word Out About the Family

    Operating as a school Family only works if everyone knows what our Family is doing and how they can participate. We have been fortunate enough to receive a fair amount of media coverage in the Los Angeles Times and newsletters distributed by LAAMP. In addition, we produced a high-quality brochure summarizing our Family's goals and activities for distribution to parents and other interested stakeholders. Regular communication about the status of our work as a Family is critical considering the influx of new teachers and administrators we experience each year. To make sure everyone is aware of our reform efforts, we held a colloquium In June, 1999 with key representatives from each of our Family schools. Approximately 40 parents, teachers and administrators reviewed the Learning Plan and discussed ways to improve professional development, technology integration, and other issues related to our Family literacy goal. In addition, this forum allowed us to reflect on how much progress we have achieved, as well as to welcome new individuals into our Family structure.

                                              Continuing / New Challenges

Pulling More Parents into the Family's Activities

    As educators, we realize that we cannot fulfill our roles without the support and assistance of parents and community members. Over the years, we have learned a great deal about how to effectively maximize parent attendance at our Family events. For example, instead of distributing 6,000 fliers, we learned that a phone tree would be a better approach, because parents respond to personal contact. We also learned that it is better to hold events at the beginning of the year because that is when parents are more motivated to act on information. One of our challenges involves reaching out the parents of students who live outside the immediate neighborhood.

Linking Technology and Student Learning

    While most schools are currently equipped with computer labs for student learning and use, we must provide teachers with training so they feel comfortable using technology as an everyday part of classroom instruction. We must continue to find more avenues for linking the use of technology to out student literacy goal. We are looking to our school-based technology coordinators to serve as leaders in this effort. We have also initiated an after school technology lab at Parkman Middle School once a week, from 4 to 8 p.m. We would like to transform this program into a more structured one in which students and parents can learn together and familiarize themselves with computer capabilities.

Delivering Consistency to the Members of our Family

    In working together as a School Family, we have discovered that many of our students are not with us consistently from elementary, to middle, to high school. The fact that so many of our students come to us on District permits or open enrollment policies means that most of our student population is fairly mobile. While it may take some time to accomplish, we would like to work with the District to modify policies so students who travel to our schools from outside the area would receive preference for staying in our School Family.

Best Practice: Passport to Reading Comes of Age

    What began as eight authors gathered to read to children and encourage them to be successful academically has blossomed into one of the area's largest events celebrating reading. In 1998, 'Passport to Reading', an annual community event hosted by the Taft School Family, included over 2,000 participants who came together to support student literacy at Taft High School.
    Building on previous success, the 3rd annual event featured over 40 authors, poets and storytellers. Local authors read from their work, signed their books and interacted with young readers. Enthusiastic parents from all of the Family's schools attended the event.
    While the event was a success, the real story of 'Passport to Reading' is what happens before the actual gathering of students, parents and community members. As part of the event preparation, local authors were invited to visit Family schools and read to assembled students. The Family also purchased copies of the participating author's books to include in classroom libraries. These sessions helped build student motivation to read, since students could actually meet with and ask questions of the authors of books they had already read. In addition, Taft high school students reinforced the importance of reading by visiting Family elementary schools and reading with younger students.
    Now in its fourth year, the organizers of 'Passport to Reading' have little difficulty recruiting local authors for participation. Given the magnitude of the event, authors are eager to market their books and see the event as a way to build student and community support for reading.

     " This year, authors came to us instead of us going to them because they had heard about the success of 'Passport to Reading'. To us, this is the best sign of success. Authors are talking to each other about the event," according to a Taft Family coordinator.
      In addition to parents and teachers, 'Passport to Reading' also helped the Taft school Family include the larger community. Several local businesses provided support and donations of food and materials including Boeing, Starbucks, and the Warner Center Hilton and Marriott Hotels. Given this level of success, expectations are high for the Taft Family to put on an even more impressive display next year.

             School Family Data: Family Students/Non-Family Students

    The Taft Family of Schools is studying the transience/traveling patterns of our students, and comparing those students who remain in the School Family with those who do not directly benefit from our programs and instruction. We began by looking at Parkman's sixth grade class, and determined that 34% of those students entering middle school were from our Family elementary schools, 27% were from other schools within our cluster, 30% were from other schools in the District, and 9% were from schools outside the District.
    As shown in the table below, students coming from Family elementary schools performed markedly better on the Stanford 9 examination than students at other schools in our cluster and those traveling from far away.

Table 1: Family SAT 9 Scores by Students' Prior School of Attendance

	Reading	Math	Languages
In Family	46	45	48
Other Cluster Schools	23	18	23
Outside Cluster	33	28	34

     These results suggest that the reform efforts and the focus of the School Family on literacy have prepared our students to perform and meet standards. Getting all Family's schools on the same page has allowed for consistent articulation, while creating a sense of community.

     Our next steps are to examine ways to meet the needs of students who are not with our Family for at least three years. We may work with the District on transportation and open enrollment policies, as well as visiting the feeder schools to share our programs with home communities.

                                     Next Steps to Sustain Reform

Going Deeper with Assessment

    Through the use of a common assessment, our teachers have learned the benefits of shared measurement and evaluation strategies. Since they are all measuring student achievement in the same way at the same time, it is possible for them to compare results across schools. In this way, our teachers can begin discussing ways to improve student transitions from elementary to middle school and from middle to high school. By making sure that all students are both pre-tested and post-tested, teachers have also begun to see the value of regular assessment procedures for diagnosing student weaknesses and planning solutions. In order to build on these successes, we need to include more of our teachers in these kinds of discussions. More of our teachers need to know how data can be used to inform what they do in the classroom. In addition, we would like to make assessment an integral part of the parent-teacher conference, so that parents are involved in conversations about what their children know and are able to do. This will require us to go much deeper with both teachers and parents about what and how the Family will measure student progress.

Reaching Out to Parents Outside our Area

    While we have been somewhat successful in terms of reaching the parents in our neighboring community, we would like to extend an open hand to the parents or our traveling students. Currently, few of these parents attend Family activities due to the long distances involved. Since many of the students in our Family commute from outside our area, we feel that the time has come for us to hold a major Family event for these parents in their community. We are investigating the best central location where we can focus our outreach efforts to maximize the number of parents participating in the Family.

Finalizing and Implementing a Family Technology Plan

    One of our goals as a Family hinges on linking the use of technology to improvements in student literacy. While our Family schools are excited about what technology has to offer, transforming this enthusiasm into a concrete plan for improving what and how students learn is much more difficult and long-term in nature. To make this a reality, we are working together to finalize and begin implementing a technology plan for all our schools. This document will provide us with a blueprint to guide our actions well into the future.

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