Miami-Dade County Public Schools (M-DCPS) proposes the Character Education Program, to achieve one purpose - to change "See if I care" actions. This will be accomplished by implementing a program that promotes nine core values: Citizenship, Cooperation, Fairness, Honesty, Integrity, Kindness, Pursuit of Excellence, Respect and Responsibility, selected by the community-at-large. The program has these goals: Goal 1: Develop a character education program that impacts all classrooms, student’s homes, and the community; Goal 2: Provide counselors, teachers, and parents with training in the use of the Character Education Framework in the schools and in the home; Goal 3: Study the impact of the project on the participants and the fidelity of the implementation of the program activities; and Goal 4: Expand project to all classes in all Miami-Dade County Public Schools.

The intended outcomes of the project include better discipline, increased academic achievement, increased participation in extra-curricular activities, increased parent, community, faculty, and administrator involvement, increased positive responses by students, parents, and teachers on the annual School Climate Survey; high attendance at training activities; action research projects for continuous improvement, compilations of lessons best practices, dissemination of formative evaluation results to all stakeholders, and formal project evaluation by an independent outside evaluator.

The project is based on research that indicated that purposeful character education positively impacts student behavior, that training should be job-embedded and characterized by instruction, practice, and follow-up, and that project effectiveness is positively impacted by the involvement of participants who clearly understand their roles and their accountability for the success of the project.

The Santa Cruz County Consortium plans to implement a multi-faceted character education program, America Cares, throughout the county utilizing the commitment of its schools (both public and non-public) and community and civic organizations. The program is based on Character Counts and uses an approach designed to establish character development as an integral element of the culture of the schools. America Cares will reinforce this education through youth participation in community projects and on advisory boards.

This program will serve approximately 4,500 junior high and high school teens with intense school and community services, while the remaining 8,000 youth in the primary and middle grades will participate in the school character development programs. The implementation process will involve a variety of school services, which include purchasing curriculum materials, building a character education library, and holding teacher in-services to show the value of character education and how to properly execute it in the classroom. The program will also involve collaborations with schools, local government, police, parks and recreation, hospitals and clinics, businesses, the University of Arizona, and the Nogales Office of Home Land Security (INS).

A quasi-experimental test will be conducted during implementation that studies the effects on adjudicated youth. In addition, the evaluation will measure the project’s objectives, to study the effectiveness of the character education program, how well it achieves the project’s objectives, and if the expected outcome is truly reached.

The West Virginia Department of Education, in cooperation with West Virginia University and the following counties: Clay, Boone, Summers, and Tyler propose the following objectives for this project: (1) identify obstacles and create new avenues that bypass the barriers to implementing character education, (2) produce a resource (i.e. manual and website) that provides affordable and easier accessibility to effective character education programs, (3) integrate character education programs into existing educational efforts, and (4) quantitatively and qualitatively measure the effects of the project through rigorous scientific inquiry.

The goal is to study the effects of this project on a randomly selected sample of K-12 schools from the four rural counties mentioned above in West Virginia. Utilizing a quasi-experimental longitudinal design, the grantee will measure the progress of participants in these schools over a three-year time period. This project hopes to identify positive progress due to training Character Development Teams (CDT) from each of the experimental schools, which include an administrator, a county administrator, teachers, a counselor, parents, and community/business members in the implementation of character education, and exposing youth to more positive role models and the character traits representative of responsible citizens.

Montana’s Honor, Respect and Responsibility (HR2) Project proposes to address the programmatic barriers that impeded total success of the Montana Character Education Project (MCEP), the state’s first attempt to develop a state character education initiative. Both initiatives target American Indian youth in grades K-8, although the program can easily be adopted statewide. The primary reason for the sub-group priority is that state data confirms that Indian students are significantly left behind in education achievement. As a small ethnic group, there is also very little research available upon which to build strategies to address the problem.

It is the goal of the Honor, Respect and Responsibility project to increase American Indian student success in Montana by building on what has been learned to implement and evaluate a character education program that: (1) is bi-culturally relevant; (2) can be integrated into classroom instruction and (3) is aligned to state standards, and (4) can be integrated into existing school reform efforts.