U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION

SAFE AND DRUG FREE SCHOOLS AND COMMUNITIES

ADVISORY COMMITTEE MEETING

TUESDAY

FEBRUARY 20, 2007

The Advisory Committee met in the Barnard Auditorium, U.S. Department of
Education, 400 Maryland Avenue, S.W., Washington, D.C., at 9:00 a.m.,
David Long, Chairman, presiding.

[PRESENT]{.underline}

DAVID LONG, Chairman

DEBORAH PRICE

KIM DUDE

FREDERICK ELLIS

MIKE HERMANN

MONTEAN JACKSON

RUSSELL JONES

SHEPPARD KELLUM

SUSAN KEYS

TOMMY LEDBETTER

MICHAEL PIMENTEL

DENNIS ROMERO

BELINDA SIMS

HOPE TAFT

HOWELL WECHSLER

[Also Present:\
]{.underline}Donni LeBoeuf, representing Robert Flores of the US
Department of Justice

Catherine Davis, Designated Federal Officer and Executive Director of
the Committee

I-N-D-E-X

Page

Review of \"Building on Results: 6

A Blueprint for Strengthening

the No Child Left Behind Act\"

Panelist Presentations 65

Questions and Answers 121

Discussion and Closing Remarks 173

P-R-O-C-E-E-D-I-N-G-S

(9:05 a.m.)

MR. LONG: Good morning everyone. We\'ll go ahead and get started.
Catherine, do you have any word, I might ask, regarding Shep and Dennis
and Bob?

MS. PRICE: Bob Flores? I think Donni is here. Donni, if you want to \--

MR. LONG: Okay. I just wondered. We have three or four not here. I\'m
just wondering. No? Okay.

The one thing that I want to mention because of the change, as you saw
from your agenda and what we\'ll be doing this afternoon, I want to
announce to the public and the two of you sitting out there that there
has been a change, and this meeting will conclude this morning at 12:30,
and then we will resume tomorrow morning at 8:30, and the meeting
tomorrow will not be in this room, but rather back down the hallway in
the training room. So tomorrow, 8:00 to 8:30 for the breakfast, and
we\'ll resume that meeting then down in the training room, but wanted to
make that announcement for the record.

And Debbie, do you have anything that you want to say as we start?

MS. PRICE: Actually, no.

MR. LONG: Okay. Okay. I trust that we\'ll have a better time getting
home this time than we did last time. As I look around, I know a lot of
people were in various airports across the country for varying lengths
of time, and I wanted to announce the winner of the time, and that was
Michael over here, who had the opportunity to spend the entire evening,
I do believe in the \-- was it in the Dallas airport?

MR. PIMENTEL: Yes, I wrote the second version of Tom Hanks\' *The
Terminal*. It was fun.

MR. LONG: But it has been difficult with air travel. We all understand
that. So if we could move to the second section, Review of \"Building on
Results: A Blueprint for Strengthening the No Child Left Behind Act\"
\--

MS. PRICE: Do you want me to introduce her for you?

MR. LONG: Yes.

MS. PRICE: I\'d be happy to introduce Holly Kuzmich. Holly Kuzmich is
the Deputy Chief of Staff here at the Department, and prior to that she
was in the Office of Policy and \-- Planning \-- there\'s too many Ps.
OPEPD is how we say it. And before that she was over in the White House
in the Office of Domestic Policy Counsel, and before that, we worked
together in the Senate.

So Holly has had a lot of input on the budget, she\'s going to give us a
review of the budget and the blueprint that they have put forward
regarding a perspective on reauthorization.

Holly?

MS. KUZMICH: Well, they\'re checking out my microphone. Hold on just a
second. There we go.

All right. Good morning. I\'m going to give an overview. This was our
NCLB policy book that we put out about a month ago. It was actually put
out right before the budget, so this is our reauthorization policy for
the No Child Left Behind reauthorization this year.

And like in previous years, we have done this as a blueprint. Instead of
doing a laundry list of legislative changes that we\'re sending to the
Hill, we wanted to go over kind of our key areas that we\'re looking at
in reauthorization and our key proposals for the reauthorization.

One thing I will say, unlike 2001, when we did a very comprehensive
rewrite of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, this year we
haven\'t proposed changes to every program in No Child Left Behind.
There are some things you won\'t see in this blueprint, some areas of
the law, and, you know, we did that for a reason. We really just wanted
to put kind of our key proposals and key changes that we were seeking in
reauthorization into our blueprint.

So there are several programs in No Child Left Behind that you don\'t
even see us mention in here. It doesn\'t mean we don\'t support them. It
doesn\'t mean we actually might not be looking at technical changes to
the program, but we\'re not looking at any major changes that we as an
administration are pushing.

A good example of that \-- and it doesn\'t mean that there won\'t be
discussion around it when we work with Congress on reauthorizing the
law. A good example of that is Title II and all of the things around
highly qualified teacher.

We have not made any specific changes, and you don\'t see us say a whole
lot about that piece of the law in this, but we know there will be
significant conversation around that issue in particular when we work
with Congress, and we\'ll be happy to engage with them then. But in
terms of things that are important to us, we wanted to stay around a
couple of thematic areas in our reauthorization proposal.

And this policy book that we put out, it came out about two weeks before
the budget, but once that budget came out you could see very much where
our reauthorization policy and our budget policy lined up in many ways
in terms of how we were allocating resources among programs under No
Child Left Behind.

And we organized our policy book around five key themes. The first of
those is reiterating our commitment to getting all kids to grade level
in reading and math by 2014.

I\'m staying true to the core principles of the law. We know there\'s
going to be a lot of discussion and debate about that this year, but we
really wanted to take a strong stand and say that we want to keep that
2014 time line in terms of getting all kids on grade level in reading
and math.

We think that annual assessments continue to be important. States now
\-- all 50 states are giving annual assessments in reading and math in
grades three through eight.

We want to continue to disaggregate that data by student subgroup, and
so those key themes are very important to us as we move forward in this
law, and we\'re going to vigorously defend those pieces of the law.

The one new piece in this kind of first them is there\'s a lot of
discussion this year around national standards and assessments and the
difference between states in how high or low they set their state
standards, and we are once again reiterating our commitment to states to
set those standards and their assessments, but we do talk about more
transparency around state assessments and how they align to NAEP.

As you know, NAEP is now given every two years in reading and math in
all 50 states, and so one thing we\'ve asked is that when states do
report cards that they put both their NAEP scores and their state
assessment scores on their report card so people can see how their state
standards line up to NAEP. It\'s purely a transparency tool for the
public to know, and we think that the appropriate place to have a debate
about the level of standards is within states.

The next area we talk about is flexibility for innovation and
improvement, and one of the biggest proposals here is the notion of a
grown model measuring individual student progress from year to year, as
opposed to measuring cohorts of students over time.

We have started a pilot here at the Department already allowing some
states to use a growth model. We\'ve got five states right now who are
in that pilot and using a growth model, North Carolina, Tennessee,
Arkansas, Delaware, and Florida.

But to do those pilots, we had to give waivers here at the Department,
and so we want to embed that principle into the law and allow states to
use a growth model if they meet certain core principles including being
able to track individual student progress, having a strong data system,
disaggregating their data, keeping that 2014 time line.

Those are important parameters for states in using a growth model, and
what we would essentially say is any state that can meet those core
principles would be able to do that under No Child Left Behind.

The other idea that we talk about in this section of the law is this
notion that, right now under No Child Left Behind, if you miss your
adequate yearly progress targets it doesn\'t matter by how much you miss
them. You\'re still identified as a school in need of improvement, and
we\'ve learned a lot of things over the past five years.

We now have really good data about schools. We know that some schools
are persistently low performing and are missing all of their targets. We
know some schools are just missing in one particular category, and we
want to be able to differentiate among those schools and target
interventions more specifically in those schools.

If a school is just having a problem with one subgroup, they really
probably need to only be focusing their tutoring and interventions on
that subgroup. If they have more widespread problems across their
school, they should be focusing on all of the students in their school.

And so we talk about this notion of prioritized support and allowing
states to set up a model to differentiate among those schools, and
we\'ve given some flexibility in how we talk about it here, because we
want to hear from states in terms of how they would propose to do this.
There\'s a lot of different ways that states could choose to do this, so
we want to have that discussion as we reauthorize the law.

The other thing we want to do is expand the transferability piece of the
law that allows states and districts to move funding between formula
programs to address, you know, local needs from year to year. And then
the last piece under this is the safe and drug free schools portion,
which, of course, you are all most interested in.

What we wanted to do in this piece is, as you know, the state grants
program we have not included in our budget for the past several years
because of the funding formula and how ineffectively it gets money out
to districts across the country.

And so what we did in our reauthorization proposal is said, you know, we
do understand the need to continue funding to states and to give them
the ability to provide technical assistance and training and best
practices to districts in their state.

And what we\'ve done is, instead of zeroing out that state grants
program, we\'ve now refashioned it as a program that goes solely to
states. It is no longer a formula that goes down to each district across
the country.

It would be a formula grant to every state, so every state would receive
funding, and they could use it for a whole host of activities, either at
the state level, or they could provide some sub-grants to high-need
districts as they see fit.

That would be at the discretion of each state in terms of whether they
want to sub-grant their money and how much of that money they want to
sub-grant, or they could use it all for state level activities,
including technical assistance and training and building stronger data
systems.

I think something we have seen over the past several years is, you know,
states are doing a lot in this area with the, you know, nine percent
federal investment that we have in education. We need to target our
dollars where we think we can have the maximum impact, and so we decided
that was at the state level and to give states the discretion as to how
they want to target that funding within their state and what priorities
they have within their state, be it school safety and emergency crisis
planning or drug and alcohol programs within their state.

The other thing we did is our national programs, which are, you know,
competitive programs to districts across the country. We align those
around four key areas, and those are emergency planning, preventing
violence and drug use, school culture and climate, and emerging needs.

And so we are really trying to categorize those programs more carefully
around the issues we see at the federal level and provide larger grants
to districts to do research-based practice within their districts.

So the state grants are for more the TA and the training and the data
systems, and then our larger national activities grants aligned around
those four activities are to develop model programs and best practices
across the country and be able to give large enough grants to do
research-based practices within those districts.

So that\'s how we\'ve gone at the Safe and Drug Free Schools Program. We
have not \-- I will say one thing we have not talked about, partly
because we have not come up with a great solution, is the issue of
persistently dangerous schools, and I know you have all struggled with
that issue and tried to tackle that issue. It probably will come up
during reauthorization, so, you know, as you keep discussing this issue
and have ideas on that, we\'d be interested in hearing them.

You know, as we started to think about it, it\'s a tough issue, because
if we don\'t have good data systems at the state, it\'s harder to come
up with a fair definition of persistently dangerous schools and tackle
that issue, and so we\'ll continue to be talking about that issue.

The third area that we talk about in our reauthorization proposal is the
issue of competitiveness in high schools. It\'s something we have talked
about for several years now and have included several pieces in our
reauthorization proposal.

We are asking states to use the NGA four-year graduation rate, which all
states have actually voluntarily signed on to, but there\'s no kind of
deadline for when they have to implement that. So we would make that a
part of the law.

Right now states get to set their own graduation rates and define it how
they would like, which means that in some states they don\'t very
accurately report the number of ninth graders who then actually graduate
four years later. So we have inflated graduation rates. We want a truer
picture of what\'s happening across the country in terms of graduation
rates.

We also are asking states to get with their higher education community
and develop standards and assessments that are aligned to what kids need
to know and be able to do when they enter college or the workplace and
create assessments around those.

We would not ask those to be part of the accountability system. They\'re
purely to raise the level of rigor in high school and give kids accurate
information about how they\'re doing in high school and whether they\'re
prepared for college and the work force, and it\'s a trend that we\'ve
started to see some states already doing, and we want to see all states
across the country doing this. We also provide incentives for AP teacher
training across the country. This was actually a proposal we announced
last year to train additional teachers in low income high schools across
the country. Forty percent of high schools don\'t offer any advanced
placement classes. They\'re usually low income high schools, so we want
to expand that.

The other thing that we do is right now under the Title I formula
districts get to choose how to target schools within their district,
which schools to serve under the Title I program.  

Usually that money is focused on elementary and middle schools, and so
we put a new infusion in our budget of funding into Title I that is
solely dedicated to high schools to get a proportional share of funding
to high schools across the country. So we\'ve got an additional \$1.2
billion in our budget to really tackle the issue of high schools and
high school reform.

The next piece is about helping teachers close the achievement gap.
These are all the content pieces of the law. It\'s a continuation of the
Reading First program, which provides research-based reading instruction
in grades K through three.

It\'s the Striving Readers Program, which is research-based reading in
middle and high schools. It\'s our Math Now Program. We have our
National Math Panel currently at work looking at research-based
practices in math instruction, and that would fund grants to districts
for research-based math instruction in elementary and middle schools.

And then the last piece is science assessments, which are currently
required under No Child Left Behind and go into effect in the \`07-\`08
school year. We would ask that those be included in the accountability
system with the target of having all kids on grade level by the year
2020.

The last piece of this is an extension of a program that we started last
year called the Teacher Incentive Fund. This is the one area of the
proposal that we do talk a little bit about teachers.

This Teacher Incentive Fund provides funding to school districts and
states to reform their compensation models and to do incentive-based pay
within their districts, both for teachers who are effective in the
classroom and for those moving into high needs schools and high needs
subjects like math and science.

We stated to give out grants last year, and it\'s been a very popular
program. It\'s getting to this notion of instead of looking at inputs in
a highly qualified teacher, looking more at the outputs in the highly
effective teacher, and it\'s a discussion we\'re hearing a lot about.

Some people are going to take this farther than we are. We don\'t think
we quite yet have the data systems within states to be able to measure
teacher effectiveness and how that should be defined, so we\'re going to
continue to fund model programs and hopefully move us down that path.

The last piece is some of our kind of boldest ideas under the law. It\'s
around the issue of school improvement and restructuring and parental
options, and it\'s partly, you know, lessons that we\'ve learned over
the past five years with all the data that we now have under No Child
Left Behind.

We know, obviously, which schools are in need of improvement and which
schools need the most help. We\'ve got about 1,800 schools in
restructuring across the country. That\'s out of about 95,000 schools
overall, so about two percent are these schools that have not made AYP
for five straight years.

We know those are the ones that need the most assistance, so we\'ve put
additional funding in our budget and expanded the School Improvement
Fund, which provides formula grants to states to target schools in need
of improvement, especially those in restructuring within their state.

The other thing that we want to do is reform the idea of \-- reform, you
know, clarify this issue of restructuring. Five years ago when we first
authorized NCLB, we didn\'t really have schools in restructuring. We
didn\'t know who they were and what they looked like and what kinds of
things they were doing, and, like I said, we now have about 1,800
schools. We know who they are.

We\'ve had schools that have gone through restructuring, and one thing
we\'ve seen is that right now under current law, there\'s five options
for how to restructure your school, and that last option is any other
form of restructuring, and that\'s the one that 87 percent of schools
are choosing, so we don\'t really know what they\'re doing. They\'re
probably not doing very much to actually restructure their school.

We are proposing to take that option away and really beef up the other
options under the law, which include state takeover. We would actually
allow mayoral takeover within that, too.

We\'ve seen that, obviously, in New York City with Mayor Bloomberg, and
we\'re seeing that in L.A. and, obviously, a discussion right here in
Washington about that now.

We would allow schools \-- currently the law allows them to become a
charter. The one thing that we would say is that there are some states
where superintendent want to be able to restructure a school and turn it
into a charter, but they have a cap in their state, and they can\'t do
it. And so in that specific case where a school is in restructuring, and
a superintendent chooses to do this, we would allow them to disregard
that cap and still turn the school into a charter school.

One of the other options is turning it over to some sort of private or
non-profit management organization. Under the law we would continue
that, and the other piece that\'s currently in law is replacing school
staff, and we want to beef up this provision. This one has been in the
news a lot lately. It\'s gotten a lot of attention.

There\'s superintendents who want to be able to replace school staff,
move staff around, put in effective teachers into their highest needs
schools, but because of their collective bargaining agreements, they
cannot do so. So we would give the superintendent the option of moving
teachers in and out of a school in restructuring.

It would solely supercede that piece of the collective bargaining
agreement and actually make this option real. Unfortunately, this option
isn\'t real for a lot of superintendents, because that collective
bargaining agreement stands in the way of moving teachers within their
schools.

The other piece of the reauthorization proposal here is improving our
supplemental services program and the tutoring under the law. We would
allow additional funding for students with disabilities, LEP students,
and students in rural areas.

We know those are often the hardest serve through our SES program, so we
would allow an increase per pupil amount for those students to get
providers \-- to give providers more of an incentive to serve them.

We would allow districts to actually set aside a piece of that Title I
funding to run the program. Right now we don\'t actually allow them to
set aside any money to administer the SES program, which makes it
difficult for a district, so we would allow them to keep some of that
money to the side to do parental outreach and actually administer the
program.

The other thing that we would do is we\'ve seen a lot of districts who
don\'t do the best job outreaching to parents. They know that if they
don\'t spend their 20 percent set-aside that they\'re supposed to keep
for public school choice in SES it will roll back to the district.

And in some districts we\'ve seen a good job on outreach, and they are
spending their 20 percent, or even if they\'re not, they\'re doing a
good job outreaching to parents and getting the word out.

What we want to say is they need to spend that entire 20 percent, or
it\'s going to roll back to the state level to try and incentive
districts to do a good job in parental outreach.

If they can prove they\'ve done a good job, and they still haven\'t
spent their 20 percent, they would be able to keep that funding, but we
really want to try and get the word out about that program. We\'re
really just now kind of starting to figure out best practices around SES
and how to get the word out to parents and get parents to sign up for
this program.

So those are the key pieces we\'ve dealt with in our policy book.
Obviously, as I said, there\'s a lot of other pieces that are not
included here that will still be part of reauthorization and still get a
significant amount of discussion, including all the other kind of titles
of the law. So we will be talking about all of those, and they will be
part of reauthorization, but this is really where we focused our efforts
at the federal level.

And I\'ve talked a little bit about the budget and how it weaves in
here. You know, the places where we\'ve put our increased funding under
No Child Left Behind are around the high school issue, around the school
improvement. We increased our funding for the School Improvement Fund,
around school choice, where we\'ve put some money in that under the
restructuring proposal, and then some other smaller pieces here and
there.

You know, we have to \-- obviously, we will always have a discussion
about resources with Congress every time we do a reauthorization, and we
will this year, too. So this is our starting point for going and talking
to the Hill on reauthorization, and I\'m sure we\'ll end up someplace
different in several months, but we\'re going to work hard to get this
done this year.

Hopefully, over the next several months you\'ll see movement. You\'ll
see hearings coming up in the House and the Senate in the next month or
two, and then we\'ll really start to get into drafting the bill.

So I\'ll answer any questions you have.

MR. LEDBETTER: You mentioned the Striving Readers Program. What kind of
an increase are you proposing in the Striving Readers Program?

MS. KUZMICH: We\'ve got the Striving Readers Program up to \$100
million. It\'s right now at about \$38 million. We\'ve actually asked
for \$100 million for several years and have not yet gotten it, so
we\'re continuing to push for that increase up to \$100 million.

MR. LEDBETTER: I find that there is a \-- you know, we talk about the
Striving Readers program as if it\'s not a problem, but we talk about
the graduation rates for high school students, and when 70 to 75 percent
of entering ninth graders are not reading on proficient levels, yet we
expect them to graduate in four years, reading at grade level, and
we\'re not funding the program to any extent.

I mean, when we\'re talking about a national program, and there\'s only
\$30 million put into it, it makes it very difficult for high schools to
meet those goals. What do you think is the problem in getting an
increase in that funding?

MS. KUZMICH: Well, the other thing that we\'re pushing, too, is
obviously that Title I high school increase could be used for things
like Striving Readers. It\'s a much more flexible pot of money, but
superintendents could certainly focus that money on adolescent literacy
programs if they chose, so they can work together.

I think the issue is just, you know, it\'s a newer program. People are
hesitant to grow it too fast, too quickly, but I do think it\'s
generally a popular program, and it\'s just one of those, you know,
decisions for Congress in terms of how they allocate funding among
programs, and programs that have gotten funding before, they\'re
hesitant to cut to put money into newer programs.

So it\'s not one that \-- it doesn\'t have any opposition. It just needs
\-- I think it needs that linkage made more clearly, that adolescent
literacy is one of our biggest issues in terms of why kids aren\'t
graduating from high school, and so we\'ve got to keep hammering home
that message.

MR. LEDBETTER: Well, when our nation\'s report card shows such a
discrepancy in reading for entering ninth graders, and you talk about
the Chapter I programs, Title I programs. Title I programs, if 70
some-odd percent of entering ninth graders are not reading at proficient
levels, there\'s not that many Title I high schools, so you can\'t take
your Title I money and use it in, you know, arbitrarily where students
are not reading. It has to be targeted at those schools if I understand
the law.

MS. KUZMICH: Well, and that\'s why we\'ve put in our increase. Our \$1.2
billion increase in Title I would go entirely to high schools, so while
there are not many Title I high schools right now, it would
significantly up that number and get additional funding into our high
schools, and then it would leave it up to the superintendent as to \--

You know, you would get to decide how \-- you and your superintendent
would get to decide how you\'re going to spend that Title I funding in
your high school, whether it be on literacy or whether it be on, you
know, some other program. It\'s obviously very flexible. So those could
significantly work together.

MR. ELLIS: Yes, I had a question about some of your comments about
persistently dangerous definition. My recollection was that this
advisory committee took on that issue early on and, matter of fact,
submitted an interim report to the Secretary with some recommendations.

I\'m kind of curious as to why we\'re hearing that we\'ve struggled with
it. My recollection is that we didn\'t struggle with it at all. It was
almost a complete consensus and unanimous support for a change in, the
language, so could you explain to me \--

MS. KUZMICH: Yes.

MR. ELLIS: \-- what happened with that?

And then my other question is can you comment a little bit about the
funding, at least right now, for the Safe and Drug Free Schools
programs, dollar amounts compared to before? We haven\'t heard that yet.

MS. KUZMICH: Yes. On the persistently dangerous issue, you know, thank
you all for your work, first of all, and just because it doesn\'t appear
in here doesn\'t mean we\'re not actually kind of still figuring out
what to do.

We didn\'t feel like we were at a place where \-- obviously, these were
kind of the top level big picture issues, and we didn\'t feel like we
were at a place where we had consensus yet around \-- within the
Department and with the Secretary to get it into the policy book.

We\'re still going to be working on that, and I don\'t think we disagree
with any of the recommendations that came out of this group. It was how
to \-- it\'s how to get it in the legislative language and how to have
kind of that national persistently dangerous program, and we just
haven\'t settled on a place yet with the Secretary.

So I\'ll be honest with you on that. We feel like we still have some
work to do, especially around the data side. It was a piece that we
struggled with, how to connect those two issues.

On the budget, obviously, you know, we know that we\'re always going to
have this discussion about money and that, you know, people in their
particular programs always want to see their program funded, and we
understand that. We\'ve obviously got limited resources, and we have to
focus is on, you know, our areas of priority.

We do, I mean, we do have a change from last year in the sense that
instead of completely eliminating the state grants program, we
understand the need to have some sort of formula program to states and
really provide money to every state.

Now I know that there\'s disagreement about the level of what that
should be and that it\'s a reduction over previous years. We\'ve had a
reduction for this program in general for several years, and we\'re
happy to talk about that. It\'s just an issue of having to decide among
a lot of different areas and having a limited budget every year.

MR. ELLIS: Can you actually state for us, please, the budget numbers?
Thank you.

MS. KUZMICH: Yes, I\'m sorry. Let me get it out. The state grants
program will get \$100 million.

MR. ELLIS: And what was it last year?

MS. KUZMICH: It was \-- hold on. I will look it up for you. Here you go.
Debbie knows it. Three forty-six.

MR. ELLIS: Thank you.

MS. KUZMICH: Correct. We still \-- and then besides the \$100 million,
we also have the money in the national programs that we continue to
fund, character education, state schools, healthy students, emergency
crisis planning, Project Serve, all of those other pieces that go in
that, and then we continue to propose that new \--

Because we\'re changing the formula for the Safe and Drug Free State
Grants Program and not sending the money to every district, we still
have that program that we\'ve included in previous budgets, which would
provide grants to \-- significant grants to LEAs for research-based
school safety and drug and alcohol prevention programs, so we kind of
tackle it in those different ways instead of doing the formula to every
district across the country.

MS. TAFT: First of all, I want to thank you for not totally eliminating
the states grants portion of the Safe and Drug Free Schools, as has been
done in the past, but I have a concern.

I saw a \-- I just happened to run into a drug-free school coordinator
on the local level, the LEA level, yesterday on my way out to
Washington, and I asked her what she thought, and she said, \"It\'s
going to be the death of the program, because once you have to apply for
grants, our school will never get a grant,\" so I \-- \"either at the
state level or at the federal level.\"

So I wonder who the states are going to be giving their technical
assistance to if there\'s no one on the ground in the local districts to
be there to receive it? Have you thought about that, that issue?

MS. KUZMICH: Well, I mean, is the point you\'re making that our State
Grants Program is funding the person administering it at the local
level, or \--

MS. TAFT: Well, right now in most school districts, the person who is in
the local level doing the work for Safe and Drug-Free Schools is funded
through the formula grant that comes to each of the school districts.

MS. KUZMICH: Well, and I think, you know, this is where, you know, over
half the districts who currently get those formula grants get less than
\$10,000, so in most cases they\'re very, very small.

You know, this is a tough issue. We have limited funds, and states could
obviously continue to fund their larger districts, if they so choose,
around that issue to help pay for the administrator of the program. But,
you know, we tend to shy \-- we try not to always just pay people\'s
salaries at the federal level.

MS. TAFT: Right. Right.

MS. KUZMICH: We\'re trying to incentivize good research-based pilot
programs, training, things that are, you know, because usually salaries
are something that\'s paid for out of the local budget, so we try and do
that as much as possible. Obviously, we\'re sensitive to that issue, and
we don\'t want to see an elimination of all those people.

MS. TAFT: I think she also was concerned about the elimination of
dollars to fund the programmings and the science-based efforts that they
have done. Ohio did a study of the school districts and the amount of
funds that they got, and those school districts that got less than
\$20,000 were doing at least six science-based, evidence-based programs,
but that takes money, and if the formula to the school districts is
eliminated, there will be no money to do those, to continue those
programs.

MS. KUZMICH: Well, obviously, we\'ll be talking a lot about this with
Congress.

MS. TAFT: So you can do all the training you want to, but you\'re still
not going to have anything that helps the individual child, and, you
know, every time I come in this building I see the value statement of
the Department, which is to help have equal access and to help all
children. I\'m worried about a lot of children not getting the help they
need in the alcohol and drug and violence prevention area.

MS. KUZMICH: Yes. Thanks.

MR. HERRMANN: I, too, want to than the Department for recognizing the
role that states play in this. I really appreciate that change. Let me
make sure I understand. In terms of the budget numbers, basically we\'ve
got the \$100 million that would go to states. Is the \$59 million
that\'s in the budget for drug prevention and school safety programs, is
that new money?

MS. KUZMICH: There is no way to answer is that new money. I mean, you
know, we reallocate dollars \--

MR. HERRMANN: Right.

MS. KUZMICH: \-- to fit our budget al the time.

MR. HERRMANN: Right.

MS. KUZMICH: So it is a new program in the sense that it doesn\'t
currently exist here at the Department.

MR. HERRMANN: Okay, so essentially the \$100 million for state grants
and the \$59 million for drug prevention and school safety programs
would replace the \$346 million \--

MS. KUZMICH: Correct.

MR. HERRMANN: \-- that\'s currently going through the State Grants
Program.

MS. KUZMICH: Correct. Correct.

MR. HERRMANN: I really think that the loser in this would be local
districts. Currently, we have 136 districts in Tennessee. I think seven
or eight of them receive some sort of a national grant.

So, you know, we\'re going to have a huge number of districts that will
receive nothing, and I\'m very concerned that while \$10,000 or \$20,000
is not much in the grand scheme of things, there are certainly some
vital services that some districts have been to provide. So I hope we
can reach some sort of a compromise on this.

MS. KUZMICH: Thanks.

MR. WECHSLER: The fourth area listed under national programs for safe
and drug free schools, \"Emerging Needs,\" can you clarify, give some
examples of what that might be?

MS. KUZMICH: An example, I mean, something we started several years ago
was Project Serve and that, you know, and Debbie can probably speak to
this. The, you know, events that happened around the country, we needed
to be able to respond and provide some funding around that area, and we
started the Project Serve program.

And so that\'s an example of an emerging need, something that we had not
been doing before but we found we had a role in and wanted to be able to
provide some funding around.

MS. PRICE: Yes. I think Holly said it exactly right, and all of us,
we\'ve heard through all of our meetings that some of the issues that
children were dealing with ten, 20 years ago when the program initially
started are still there, but there have been a lot of changes, and as
time goes on, new issues come up, and so this would give the opportunity
for the Secretary to address those specific issues.

Besides Serve, emergency crisis grants came in following Columbine, but,
you know, there are just so many issues that come up that you can\'t
foresee, and this allows the Secretary to have dollars to address those
issues, and they may be \-- you know, I mean, you can speculate on what
they might be, but quite honestly, we\'re not sure of what they are at
this point, because they haven\'t emerged.

MR. MODZELESKI: I was going to say, Debbie \-- Debbie, I was going to
say that what we want to do is make sure that the Secretary has the
authority. For example, the pandemic flu is one that we talked about.

It\'s down there. It\'s on the horizon. We want to make sure that we
have at least the authority to provide support to school districts if
that becomes a problem, rather than seeking authority after the fact.

MS. KEYS: I wonder if you could speak a little bit more about the use of
growth models for evaluation. Is there funding that\'s going to support
that? Are the states responsible themselves for creating their data
collection infrastructure, or will there be funding for that? And just
if you\'d speak more about that, because it\'s a new idea.

MS. KUZMICH: Yes. We don\'t have funding specifically for growth models.
We have funding on probably on two areas that really kind of target that
issue. First of all is our state assessment dollars overall. It\'s about
\$400 million that we started in No Child Left Behind and we\'re
continuing to fund.

You know, most states have obviously done their three through eight
assessments, but they need to continue working on science, on high
school assessments, a lot of issues around LEP and special ed and
assessments for those populations of students, and so that\'s a broad
area of funding that states can use to strengthen their assessment
systems.

On the data side, we provide \-- we request about \$50 million for our
statewide longitudinal data systems grants, and we\'ve \-- that program
has been around for several years, and we have given out grants to about
14 states already, and we\'ve asked for increased funding so that we can
get funding to all 50 states to improve their data systems at the state
level. Some states are already there and have the capacity to do this,
the five that are in our pilot right now and several others.

MS. KEYS: Would you identify the five again?

MS. KUZMICH: Yes. It\'s Tennessee, North Carolina, Delaware, Arkansas,
and Florida, and we\'re currently in the middle of \-- we\'re going to
be reviewing a new round of states in March with our peer review process
to get more states into the pilot this year, so there could potentially
be some more.

So those two pieces of funding are potentially ways for states to
strengthen their state systems, but it would be an option for the state.
They could continue with the current accountability system in No Child
Left Behind, or they could do the growth model.

MS. KEYS: And would you also clarify \-- you mentioned a waiver \-- what
that waiver is for?

MS. KUZMICH: Well, right now, for the pilots that we\'re doing, we\'ve
had to give a waiver under No Child Left Behind to do those, but it was
such an issue of great interest to the community, and that\'s why we put
together a pilot and brought in our peer reviewers and worked with the
Hill to start this pilot. So that\'s why we\'ve proposed to actually
write it in the law this time so we would no longer have to use a waiver
to do a grown model under NCLB.

MS. KEYS: And then how does parental consent come in if your tracking
these kids over time? Is that a factor or anything that you have to do?

MS. KUZMICH: States \-- FERPA already deals with that in terms of
protections for students, and states have dealt with that for years.
We\'re not asking states to do anything over and above what many of them
are already currently doing.

They have ways to protect privacy for students. They assign them a, you
know, a random I.D. number that can\'t be tracked back to the student.
So they have to take all those protections themselves, and they have to
decide that they want those individual identifiers within their state.

So that\'s a state-level policy decision that we don\'t ask for and we
won\'t require as part of reauthorization, but if they want to do a
growth model, it\'s obviously a key piece of doing that.

MR. ELLIS: All right. If I could just \-- first of all, I want to
reiterate the point that was made over here by Hope and by Mike. We
appreciate what the Department does for our youngsters in our various
states, and we\'re passionate about safe and drug free schools, or none
of us would be here.

To that end, however, I \-- and I know this is a work in progress, so
part of our job is to give you something to think about.

MS. KUZMICH: Yes.

MR. ELLIS: And with the state grants, I was just listening as you\'re
saying \$100 million. For the state that I come from, it would be about
probably around \$10 million. It would be about \$1.50 or \$1.60 per
child. That won\'t go very far, and I was hearing the same thing from
Ohio and Tennessee. And I know you know that, but I just want to throw
that out there.

Then when you look at that as a part of the big picture, other things
that you were talking about such as the incentive based pay, I
understand exactly what the philosophy might be. The practicality of all
that is it\'s been tried before in the state of, of all places, Texas,
and in the state of California we had a \$700 million incentive grant
program that went down in flames because the internal politics of the
teachers union \-- so that they were devouring some of their own,
because it was up to \$25,000 per teacher. It got to the point that they
chose not to take it.

I think we might want to look as a nation at how to improve teacher
technique, get into the classrooms, rather than offering up money as
incentives for particular teachers. That\'s just something to think
about, and, as I say, I know that it\'s been tried before, career
ladders back in Texas some 20 years ago.

But I\'m mentioning that because that then has an effect on the overall
that we\'re talking about, for example, with the state grants, so I\'m
just using that as an example, and another would be the restructuring.

When you talk about mayors taking over school districts, all due respect
to mayors, but they\'re \-- and I want to be careful how I say this, but
their educational intelligence level is not \-- their background
expertise is not in that, and again, we\'ve had some good examples of
failure, and we would ask that we pay particular attention to failures,
and I\'ll just give you two quick ones.

Oakland, Jerry Brown went down in flames, and now you mentioned Los
Angeles, but that has gone down in flames, because it was declared
unconstitutional. So as we start down these roads, just some things to
think about that \-- and I\'m just throwing those out again from the
standpoint of increasing funding in other areas.

And lastly, as we put things out, whether it\'s in an entity of all the
states sitting around here or whatever it might happen to be, it\'s how
we market it. And, for example, as we sat here, if I would have started
out saying, \"I didn\'t hear you mention vouchers,\" and vouchers is a
big part of, I think, what is being mentioned here by the Department, if
I would have mentioned that \--

I\'m going to use this as an example. If we mention that first in many,
many places in the country and talking to many different groups, that
becomes the talking point, rather than getting at the real meat. So
sometimes it\'s how we market things.

And lastly, just as a suggestion, rather than have mayors take over as a
part of the restructure, you might want to think about intermediate
agencies across this country, because they\'re fully designed for that.

MS. KUZMICH: Yes. Thank you for that. Let me just say a couple things
real quickly on that. On teachers, we have \-- obviously, our boss is
from Texas. She learned a lot from the career ladder experience there.

We actually \-- the program has been fairly successful so far. It
requires districts or states to work with their teachers unions and get
their buy-in as part of this whole proposal, so we\'ve actually seen
good interaction from a lot of districts across the country who want to
do this.

It\'s why we\'re still doing it as kind of a pilot program to see how
it\'s working. We think we\'ve learned some lessons from programs that
haven\'t worked across the states before, and there is a growing \--
there\'s a growing interest in this area.

On the whole issue \-- you know, let me just kind of speak real quickly
on the broader issue. Obviously, we can\'t provide \-- you know, every
year when we do our budget it\'s a tough position in terms of what
programs we fund and where we put our dollars.

We\'re the federal government. We\'re only a nine percent investor, so
we can\'t fund every student in every program across the country, and we
have to choose, and, you know, it\'s always a tough exercise.

We\'ve \-- I think something that we try and go by \-- there are
obviously a couple of key programs where we put very significant funding
in, Title I, special education, Pell Grants. Those are probably, you
know, three of the biggest programs that we have here at the Department
that do provide significant funding.

In a lot of other areas we have tried to recognize what our role needs
to be at the federal government, that we can\'t fund every student,
every teacher, every program across the country, and we have to make
some choices and fund models, pilots, research-based programs,
significant pieces that other people can\'t do, and that\'s where our
area of national leadership is.

So, you know, it\'s always a tough battle, and we always wish that there
were more in our budget that we could allocate, but we\'ve got to live
within our reality, so.

MR. LONG: Go ahead, Kim.

MS. DUDE: I know that the focus of this group has been K through 12
funding and issues, but being a higher education prevention person, I
was curious if you could tell me.

Under the Safe and Drug Free Schools, I know that higher education has
access to some of those monies through grants. Can you give me any idea
of what higher education prevention funding might be like?

MS. KUZMICH: I was going to say I don\'t actually remember,
unfortunately, I\'m sorry to say. I know we obviously have some small
programs over in HEA.

MR. MODZELESKI: We left it open, I think, in the discretionary grant in
a portion under those four congruent titles that Holly talked about, to
be determined in what we call the specs that are working on with the
details within the overall program.

MS. KUZMICH: I certainly don\'t think we have any opposition to, you
know, working with the higher ed community, so those are issues to be
worked out.

MR. LEDBETTER: I notice here that the Reading First, you plan to expand
the Reading First Program.

MS. KUZMICH: Continue.

MR. LEDBETTER: Continue to expand the Reading First Program. No one can
argue with the success of the Reading First Program. It\'s been some
remarkable results there, but I think that \-- and, of course, my
background is secondary, okay, so my background is adolescent literacy.
That\'s where my interest is.

And I think that the Reading First Program, as we continue to invest in
the Reading First Program, we\'re seeing some remarkable results, but
the adverse effect is actually happening. In grades K through three
we\'re seeing students achieve great success with reading, but when the
Reading First Program stops at K through three, after the third grade is
where we start to see the decline in reading before they enter high
school, and that\'s one of the reasons why when they enter high school
so many of these students cannot read.

It\'s not a matter of them not being able to read. They can\'t
comprehend the written text. Okay, they can pronounce the words, but
they can\'t comprehend the meaning. They don\'t make the connection.

Now I think that at some point we need to look and take a very serious
look at the adolescent issue, because what\'s actually happening to us
is we\'re getting this false sense of improvement in grades K through
three, and then the reverse is starting to happen before they enter high
school, and we need to expand that program even more. I mean, the
Reading First Program is funded at, what, \$350 million dollars?

MS. KUZMICH: A billion.

MR. LEDBETTER: A billion. Okay, \$1 billion, and we\'re only talking
about \$100 million, and we\'re only getting \$30 million for the rest
of the grades past the third grade. Now I\'m not in disagreement. The
base needs to be established, but once that base is established, we need
to expand that program if we expect those students to be productive
citizens once they exit high school.

MS. KUZMICH: And, you know, that Reading First Program, we have \--
we\'ve had better research and better programs to disseminate for states
and districts to use. We had the Reading Excellence Act before the
Reading First Program, and so there was some base of knowledge to start
expanding that program, and we\'re starting to develop \-- we have
developed some of that knowledge base in adolescent literacy, and we
need to continue to do more, and then we can start to expand that to
other districts and schools across the country.

MR. LEDBETTER: I think one of the things that has happened \-- I know in
my state, what has happened, when Alabama Reading Initiative was first
implemented, it was open to grades K through 12. That door is being
closed to the upper grades now because of the funding being directed
through Reading First.

In the very beginning, all schools were invited to become a part of it,
and a lot of the high schools became a part of it, but since then the
schools are on their own. There\'s no help there hardly, and that\'s why
I say that I think that that program is a tremendous program.

But as that funding goes to the states, the states then are
concentrating on those grades, and they\'re not concentrating on the
upper grades, and I think that there\'s a connection. There has to be a
connection, and once the U.S. Department of Ed, you know, looks at it
and says, \"Hey, we need to expand this program,\" then the states will
also expand the programs, as well.

MS. KUZMICH: Yes. Thank you.

MR. LONG: I\'m going to bring this to a close. We\'re running over a
little bit, but I think that that\'s an illustration of the interest in
this, and I was thinking about, as you sat out there, first of all,
thank you for being here and explaining this and answering questions. I
got to thinking how that must feel, sitting in front of about 12 or 14
people, so again, thank you very much for \--

MS. KUZMICH: That\'s all right. Thank you.

MR. LONG: \-- assisting this.

MS. KUZMICH: Sure.

MR. LONG: Thank you. And next, if we could have our \-- we could set up
for the panel.

We will open with, before they address \-- and Bill, you\'re going to be
giving a short presentation first, and then we\'ll move in. Is that
correct?

MS. PRICE: Debbie Rudy of our office, who is responsible for all the
areas related to data and a variety of issues, was going to make a
presentation. Unfortunately, she is ill today, and so Bill is going to
do her presentation in place of Debbie. I think you all have met Debbie
at a previous \-- on a previous panel.

MR. LONG: My question then is, as we set this up, I presume we want to
have it the same as we\'ve had in the past, or would you \-- do you
want, since we have three of the people giving the presentations sitting
at this table, what are your wishes as to how we practically speaking do
this?

MS. DUDE: Whatever you\'re comfortable with, I mean, whatever Mike and
Howell are comfortable with, if they want to stay where they are or \--

MR. LONG: Okay. Mike, Howell, how would you prefer to do this? Okay,
let\'s \-- the vote just came from Michael, and if we could have the
panelists then please take a seat there so that we can do it in the same
manner that we have in the past.

And I\'ll introduce. We know so many of the \-- Mike Herrmann, whom we
all know, Executive Director of the Office of School Health Safety and
Learning Support from Tennessee Department, and Howell Wechsler,
Director, Division of Adolescent School Health, Centers for Disease
Control, and Doug Hall, Senior Vice President, Pride Surveys.

Doug, welcome, and Deborah Rudy, who is sitting to my right over here,
now better known as Bill Modzeleski, Office of Safe and Drug Free
Schools, Department of Ed, and Bill will be, as we just heard, will be
giving Deborah\'s presentation.

So if we could start, please, with Mike.

MR. MODZELESKI: I think we\'re going to start here to provide an
overview.

MR. LONG: I\'m sorry.

MR. MODZELESKI: Okay?

MR. LONG: Okay.

MR. MODZELESKI: Yes. All right.

MR. LONG: I apologize.

MR. MODZELESKI: Actually, the important folks are going to follow. I
mean, that\'s the \-- Mike\'s going to present reality. Howell is going
present the YRBSS and the state portion, and Doug is going to present a
little bit about what the Pride survey does at the local level, and I
think all three present reality, hopefully.

I want to start by saying is that there is a wealth of information that
is collected at the national level regarding data. We have the YRBSS,
CDC, and that\'s \-- again, Howell will explain that in much more
detail, but I will point out that 47 states, two territories use the
YRBSS system as a measure of prevalence of alcohol and drug use and
other behaviors in their states.

Monitoring the Future, which has been going on since the mid-1970s,
measures alcohol and drug use between eighth graders, tenth graders, and
twelfth graders, and that is done on a national level and comes out
every year. We have that information available to us.

The National Household Survey on Drug Use and Health is also talks about
alcohol and drug use between 12- and 18-year-old students for us,
anyway, which is of interest, and that comes out on a regular basis and
is available to use.

School-associated violent \-- that study is something that we started
back in 1994, and this is a study that we continue with the Centers for
Disease Control in their injuries branch, and that provides us with data
on the number of students who are killed either in school, on the way to
school, or at a school function, as well as the number of students who
are suicide victims while in school.

And there is a chart \-- one of the things that we\'ve put at
everybody\'s desk is what\'s called an Indicators Report, which the
Office actually pays for most of the data collections that are in here,
but to separate out some independence between the Office and the
National Center for Educational Statistics is that they have editorial
license to put that together, so much of the data that you see on
school-associated violent death.

The School Survey on Crime and Safety, that is a study which we support,
again done by NCES. One of the things that \-- that gives us a lot of
data on what students are saying about crime and violence in school. The
Schools and Staffing Survey, otherwise known as the SASS Survey, again,
is a survey conducted by NCES, and that gives us information on what
teachers are saying about crime and violence in school.

We have the National Crime Victimization Survey and the School Crime
Supplement. Actually, they are two very \-- two different surveys. The
National Crime Victimization Survey is given every year by the
Department of Justice, and the supplement to that, which focuses
exclusively on school and school-aged kids and asks question about crime
and victimization in school is given every other year.

The Gun-Free Schools Act data is a report that we collect since 1994
from every state, and that provides us with information on the number of
students who have been expelled from school for carrying a firearm to
school.

So we have data on the number of kids who have been expelled, what grade
they\'re in, and what happened to them, meaning whether they suspended
or whether they expelled and were they provided educational services or
they weren\'t.

The other one is not up here, and again, Holly alluded to it this
morning, and I didn\'t put it up there, because while it is a data
collection effort on the part of the state, it doesn\'t provide us with
any new data, and that\'s persistently dangerous schools.

And so if you look at persistently dangerous schools, what you\'ll see
is that there is a requirement for the state to collect data for the
locals, but most of the states have used data that they already are
collecting, suspension-expulsion data, Gun-Free Schools Act data, so
they really set up a new data set. So the data that\'s being used for
the persistently dangerous comes from existing data sources.

Now looking at this data, a couple things I want to point out is that
nowhere in here is there anything what\'s called incident-based data, so
I know that there has been \-- Debbie and I get badgered by certain
groups over time asking us to establish a mandatory incident-based data
reporting system.

Now there are some of those systems around. New York City has an
incident-based data reporting system. California has some remnants of it
based upon tings that they did over a decade ago and funded, and then
once they withdrew the funding, a lot of that went away.

And Florida has some systems, some of their school systems set up for
incident-based data report. Essentially, that is that every time an
incident occurs, be it a criminal incident or a non-criminal incident of
a certain magnitude, it\'s reported as an incident, and so we have that
incident reported.

The other thing about all of these data sets is that none of these data
sets tie back into performance, so there\'s no way that you could look
at this data and say we can tell whether crime is going up or going
down. We could tell whether drug use is going up or going down.

We could tell what segments of the population is going up or going down,
but we can\'t really tell why. We can\'t say it\'s because of Shep\'s
good program or something else. All we could say is that in certain
areas, certain states, certain school districts, it is going up or going
down.

Now at the \-- under Title IV, there\'s three levels of reporting.
There\'s the Uniform Management Information Reporting Systems, and I
think that Mike will talk a little bit about that this morning. That
really sets the requirement up for the locals about what type of
information they must collect, and this is a system that rolls uphill in
the sense that the LEAs collect some of that.

The states have the requirement to collect some of that information.
They collect it and report it to us. We in turn take that information
and report it to Congress, so there\'s three levels of reporting that go
on here.

The UMIRS, otherwise known as Uniform Management Information System,
Information Reporting Systems, I should say, is a state level system,
state level meaning that it is the state that has the responsibility for
implementing this particular provision, and it basically requires states
to collect information at two levels.

One is the building level or the school level, and two is the state
level, and there\'s four things, four basic things that the state must
collect. One is truancy rate, so the law basically requires that local
education agencies report truancy, not only by the district but by the
school building.

One of the issues, and I\'ll talk about it a little bit later, is that
it\'s one thing to report truancy rates, but what we\'ve seen on the
national perspective is that not only is there not a national definition
of truancy, there is very few state level definitions of truancy, and,
matter of fact, in many districts they\'re using multiple definitions of
truancy, so it\'s hard to measure truancy not only at a national level.
Sometimes it\'s very difficult even at the state level to measure
truancy.

The other thing that\'s required at the building level or the school
level is the suspension and expulsions related to \-- it\'s related to
use of \-- drug use and violence, and so what is required is that what
is the number \-- I should say what is the number of suspensions and
expulsions for a alcohol or drug or violence offense, and again, that\'s
at the school level, not at the state level or district level, so that
gives you a pretty specific degree of the, using the new term
\"granularity.\"

The other two \-- you like that, Mike? The other two requirements are
the types of programs and curriculum services supported with the Safe
and Drug Free School funds and the prevalence age of onset perception
and health risk perception of social disapproval of alcohol, drug use,
and violence prevention. Now these two are done at the state level, and
the prevalence age of onset is \-- most of that information has come
through surveys that are being conducted at the state level.

Now, because of time, I want to skip over the reporting and merely say
as that all that information that is collected by or through UMIRS is
required to be reported, primarily through the consolidated report to
the Department of Education.

Once we get that information, we develop a report. We collect all 50
states and territories and then submit that to Congress.

The other part here is that what we realized very early on in the game
is that as we begin to look at the states and their use and measuring of
data is that there were a lot of problems. We were using different
definitions, different time periods, different measures, and what we
began and what we set up is what we call the Uniform Data Set Project,
and this project is set out to do three things.

One is provide common definitions of all of those things that are to be
measured under UMIRs. So, for example, what we\'re trying to do is make
sure that not only all 50 states but all 15,000 districts and all
110,000 buildings have the same definition of truancy, have the same
definition of suspension, have the same definition of expulsion, the
same definition of an incident is.

I mean, right now is that there is not total agreement about what all of
these things mean, so even though we\'re collecting the data, the data
is not comparable, because all of these things mean different things to
different locations. So first thing in the data set we\'re trying to do
is to get some common definitions.

Two is we\'re trying to describe the uniform data set measure to be used
to meet the requirements of UMIRS. So, for example, there are some
states that say that what we want to measure is drug use over 30 days.

Other states are saying we want to measure drug use over a year, annual
drug use. Other states want to say lifetime drug use. So what we\'re
trying to do is set up a standard that everybody could use and agree
upon, so we\'re all collecting the same information and the same
measures.

And lastly is the way that that is gone about, the data elements
required for each measure, so once we have a measure, trying to come to
an agreement is basically what are the elements of that measure. What do
you really need to do? What do you really need to collect? And make sure
everybody\'s collecting the same thing so we again have some degree of
uniformity for all the states.

The issues for us are several. One is purpose, and I will tell you is
that in the \-- when No Child Left Behind was authorized the first time,
there was not a lot of discussion about data or data collection.

The UMIRS provisions as well as some of the reporting provisions were
put in without a lot of discussion or debate, and, therefore, while they
went in there, there were some problems that we had, one of them being
is that we can\'t \-- without regulation we can\'t really tell a state
how to collect information or specifically what information to collect,
and that\'s why we\'re doing some work now to try to make sure we could
get agreement, and I want to underscore this comes from agreement, not
through mandates, what types of information to collect.

So it\'s not only collecting it but how it\'s to be used, and there is
no tie-in in the legislation at this point in time. Matter of fact, if
you look at the part and the part score in some of the discussions about
the part, one of the interesting things there is that they cite the fact
that when you look at the state grant, the formula grant program, is
that because of the way the formula grant is set up is that even data
that\'s being collected, it\'s very difficult to take those school
districts that are in greatest need and provide them with additional
resources. Everybody gets about the same on a proportionate basis.

So it\'s not only for collecting data. I think that as we move forward
what we want to do is try to tie the collection of data into the use of
data and for decision-making, and how do we do that effectively?

Secondly, what level? Again, we talk about data being collected at three
levels, the local level, the state level, and a national level, and we
have to basically try to settle in and try to figure that out.

I was saying is that while we\'re going that, we\'re also going down two
roads here. One is that we are complying with the current legislation. I
should point out that the current legislation, with the UMIRS
provisions, with the biennial report, with all those other requirements,
is in effect until another law is passed, so we can\'t ignore that piece
of legislation, but we\'re going to have to go down and ensure that
those data requirements are met.

At the same time thinking ahead is that as we\'re moving along with
reauthorization, what types of data collection, what types of
requirements should we impose on the states if, in fact, we have a bill
that looks like \-- whether it\'s the one that\'s proposed now or
something different, so this is looking at this at multiple levels, not
just the level of where we are.

And lastly, which measures and which constructs? Again, this is about
there are so many measures out there. This gets back to the uniform data
set and coming to agreement with the states and with the locals on
exactly what measures we should accept on a uniform basis so that as
begin to look at the data, we have some comparability at the state
level, the local level, and the national level.

MR. LONG: Thank you very much, Bill. We will \-- and I\'ll ask this.
We\'ll go in order, Mike, Howell, and then Doug, and then we\'ll get to
questions from the Committee. So if we could start, please, with Mike.

MR. Herrmann: Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I think I enjoy sitting on
the other side better, but I\'m going to make this quick. I think Bill
did a really good job of hitting a lot of what I wanted to cover. Two
things I want to try and do is talk about the UMIRS system, which Bill
mentioned, and also speak to kind of data collection things that we\'re
doing at the state level that may be a little bit different from this.

As Bill said, NCLB really created an expectation for states and locals
to create a uniform management information and reporting system.
Basically, the system is \-- the legislation requires these four
elements. The first two have to be collected and reported at the
building level.

The thing I think that I would say is, you know, when we go to look at
each of these individually, you know, you would be amazed. Those of you
that are not familiar with schools and data collection, I think you
would be amazed at how difficult it is to collect truancy data.

We have kind of a running argument for about a year that we lost with
the Department of Education about whether or not we already collect and
report attendance data for every school. So it was kind of our position
for a while that attendance was really just a flip of truancy.

So we lost that argument, so now we do have a truancy definition, and we
are in compliance with this requirement. But it has taken \-- it took
about two years of work with our attendance folks to finally arrive at a
truancy definition that was acceptable.

Part of the problem is you\'ve got this whole issue of excused versus
unexcused absences, and when you look at that, there\'s all sorts of
opportunities for building level interpretation in terms of exactly how
that gets done, but at this point in Tennessee, the definition of
truancy is five or more unexcused absences in a year. So we do have that
now.

I think that\'s important to remember with truancy is it\'s very closely
tied to some larger state and local data collection challenges.
Attendance is a very important data element for schools and school
districts. It generates funding and all sorts of things.

And one of the things that, while I think Tennessee has a fairly well
developed student data management system, you know, we certainly
struggle with this whole issue of attendance reporting, and you really
can\'t get to the truancy issue if you don\'t have the attendance part
straightened out.

The second area in the UMIRS is the incidence of violence- and
drug-related offenses. I think the work that the Department has done
with the uniform data set project is very important.

We certainly struggle with uniform definitions just within the state. I
really think that this measure is more valuable as a trend measure at
this point than it is as something that allows you to compare district
to district.

Just as an example, last year I had a district that reported five
students being expelled for the year. When you looked at the reason \--
we give them 15, 20 reasons that a student can be expelled. The reason
for the students being expelled, all five, was \"Other,\" so one of the
things that we\'ve learned, too, is that you really can\'t allow
\"Other\" to be part of the data set, because it\'s just \-- you\'re
going to get that.

We do not in Tennessee collect incident data. We collect data based on
disciplinary actions. That\'s something that has been looked at, but
there\'s a huge push back, I think, from local districts to add any more
data collection than they\'re already doing.

The other thing is, you know, sometimes, I think, because disciplinary
action is tied to attendance data, I\'m not sure that you don\'t get
better reporting on discipline than you might get on incident reporting,
so there\'s kind of some pros and cons there.

The other thing that we do collect in terms of incidents is zero
tolerance, as well as victim of violent crime data, and just, you know,
something that\'s not been talked a lot about, I think, in this
Committee is the whole issue of victims of violent crime, but I do think
that can be a pretty important piece of data.

We\'ve had some struggles getting the reporting going and getting the
definitions going, but I really think once we get that in place, that\'s
an important piece of information.

The other required element is the types of curricular programs and
services. I think it\'s helpful in terms of giving you a broad idea of
how Title IV funds are being expended. Unfortunately, it really doesn\'t
do a very good job of capturing the scope or fidelity of implementation,
and you\'re essentially getting a laundry list of programs, you know,
and I think we know from research that how well the program is
implemented and how true to fidelity it is is very critical.

Then in terms of incidence and prevalence data, you know, this is
generally being obtained through surveys. You know, I think one of the
issues is there\'s a lot of push back at the school level on surveys.

They\'re perceived as being difficult to implement, FERPA issues, costs
issues, and we have a lot of parents in Tennessee and I think other
states that really don\'t want students being asked about things like
drugs and that dirty three-letter word, sex, which I\'m sure Howell is
going to speak to.

But, you know, for the most part in Tennessee, we rely upon the YRBS
survey, which has been very important for us. We do have a lot of
districts or some districts that use surveys such as PRIDE. The thing, I
think, that I\'ve noticed from the districts that have used PRIDE and
other surveys really helps them a lot in terms of being able to speak to
what the situation is within our district, because, for the most part,
our incidence data is statewide as opposed to local.

In terms of looking at some other data measures that we use at the state
level, the persistently dangerous schools criteria is actually a
combination of some of our more serious disciplinary issues, as well as
victims of violent crime data. While we\'ve not identified any school as
being persistently dangerous, we do use that measure, particularly with
our urban school districts, to identify schools that have kind of a high
index on those measures. So I think that\'s been a useful tool.

We also \-- the performance targets that Bill mentioned are an element.
The Gun-Free Schools Act data \-- one thing I know a lot of states use
is the Kids Count information that\'s available through the Anne E.
Casey Foundation.

Local school districts are required as part of their Title IV
application to identify risks and then to match to those risks
strategies, so one of the things that we\'ve tried to do to help local
districts is consolidate all of the various data pieces that we have
available at the state level for them so that they don\'t have to go out
and do all that background work, which I think has helped a lot in terms
of getting particularly some of our smaller districts more focused on
addressing risk factors.

A huge area, I think, for us to look at is AYP and other academic data
that\'s available, and then another area that we\'ve been using is we do
have a requirement in the state that every school have a school
improvement plan, and part of that school improvement planning process
involves looking at school climate issues, how students feel about, you
know, their school and belonging and safety and those sorts of things.
And then we\'ve also \-- there is at the state level juvenile court data
that\'s available.

So those are some of the things that I think are important to look at
from a state perspective.

MR. LONG: Thank you very much, Mike. We appreciate that, and next we
have Howell.

MR. WECHSLER: I think a number of states including Tennessee are using
the Youth Risk Behavior Survey or YRBS to measure incidence of risk
behaviors. What I want to do \-- so it has great relevance for this
discussion, what I want to do is share with you some of the many great
strengths that the system has but also limitations, as well.

YRBS focuses on a broad spectrum of health risk behaviors. That\'s very
important. Believe it or not, there are other issues that are terribly
important to our young people besides violence and drug use, and you see
the seven behavioral risk areas that we think are the most important for
schools and the nation to address. These are all covered by YRBS.

Yes, we are the ones who collect the sex data, and in the beginning
there were a number of states that would just cross off those items and
collect everything else, but now we\'re down to only three or four
states, one of them my home state, Georgia, but you\'re not hearing that
so much anymore, and one of the reasons, I think, is because people from
all sides of the political spectrum have come to see just how important
it is to have these data.

So it\'s a great strength that we collect all this information, because
it makes it much more appealing to schools, because whereas the Safe and
Drug-Free Schools people are coming in and bothering them about surveys
for the first two areas, there are plenty of other programs out there
that are bothering them for surveys in the other areas. This gives them
a chance to do one comprehensive survey, and also within this survey,
you can look at associations across and among the different risk
behaviors.

We\'ve been tracking this for some time, so since 1991 we\'ve been doing
this every other year, so we have some really good trend data. That\'s a
strength, and then the most important thing, really, is that while there
are other national data collection systems, we have a uniform set of
measures that are used at the national, state, and large urban school
district level, and you can really compare across states and cities and
to the national averages, as well.

It\'s a probability sample of ninth to twelfth grade students,
anonymous, self-administered. They\'re still doing it on paper, but in
two or three, four years we\'ll be having them enter it directly on
computer.

The next-to-last bullet is really important, because the one reason we
get a very good response rate from schools that consent to participate
is our solemn pledge that this will be done within one class period.

What that means is, with all those topics we have to cover, if you come
up with a new question that you want to ask, you can\'t get it in there
unless you tell us which ones we can take out, so to put one in, you\'ve
got to take one out. We have a very good amount of breadth of topics,
but there\'s limitations to the depth of how much we can go into in each
of the specific topics.

One thing I didn\'t mention is that it is appropriately entitled Youth
Risk Behavior Survey. One way we have limited the scope of it is that we
focus solely on behaviors. We do not have questions that ask about
knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, or perceptions. It\'s just about what
they do. We do it every other year, usually in the springtime.

You can see with the national probability sample it\'s approximately
14,000 students that participate, and the response rate overall if you
multiply the school level response rate by the student level response
rate, it comes out to 67 percent.

I\'d like to point out that Monitoring the Future has a response rate of
50 percent, so if there are substantial disagreements between the two
surveys, I\'d put my money on YRBS as being more representative of
what\'s going on in the nation.

The good news is, though, that on a regular basis we check. We compare
the two surveys, and we find that there are not large differences. They
are fairly similar, and they each have their benefits for why we would
continue to conduct both of them.

This gives you a look over time of participation by states. You can see
we\'re now up to 44 states participating. There are four states that had
preexisting systems. They collect data on youth through schools through
their own systems.

That\'s their prerogative. There are only two states that I know of that
are not collecting any data on youth behaviors through school-based
systems, and that\'s Virginia and Pennsylvania.

Important to mention there are no mandates to use this. We give the
education agency a little bit of money to help with their cost. We
crunch the data for them.

We produce and deliver their reports to them, but this is strictly
voluntary. They choose to participate. You can see we also have 23
states.

The number on the bottom is important, that 90 percent, through a lot of
technical assistance. Mike is right. It is not easy to get schools to
agree to participate or to do this thing right, but we provide extensive
technical assistance, and we\'ve now gotten up to 90 percent of the
states and cities that have what we call weighted data.

In other words, they\'re doing it in the right way, and they\'re getting
an adequate response rate so we can say that their data is
representative of what\'s going on across the state.

There are many different policy applications for the YRBS data. It\'s
used to present a picture of what\'s going on among youth, to create a
lot of awareness among policymakers, media, the public.

Many people use it to set program goals. The Public Health Service
measures quite a few of the healthy people objectives for the nation
through the YRBS national results. It\'s used all the time to support
and tie the development of programs and policies by advocates to support
health-related legislation, and it\'s in just about every funding
application you could possibly imagine.

I\'m going to take you now through what are not really a sample but are
just about every single item related to violence and alcohol and drug
use that\'s in the YRBS. We have done extensive testing on the
reliability of these items, and the reliability is fairly substantial.

These are the violence-related measures. You see the items that are in
asterisks. Those are items that are currently included as key measures
among the indicators of school crime and safety book.

Perhaps of most interest on this one are the items related to what goes
on on school property. We ask whether the students have carried a
weapon, been in a fight and so on on school property, as well as off of
school property. Some of these are 30-day period. Some of these are over
the past 12 months.

We collect data on a spectrum of behaviors related to suicide. I should
mention for the violence-related behaviors, what we\'ve seen in our
trends \-- and I do have a handout I\'ll give out later that lists
trends since 1991 in these areas \-- what we\'ve seen related to
violence is that \-- how did that happen? Here we go.

In terms of violence trends, most of those items that you saw went down
across the 1990s and have been pretty flat since we entered the new
decade. In terms of suicide, they seriously consider suicide and made a
suicide plan, have gone down since 1991. There have been no changes in
the prevalence of actually attempting suicide.

These are the items that we look at in terms of alcohol and other drug
use. Current use is defined as within the past 30 days, and most of
these items have gone down significantly since the late 1990s.

Other items in terms of alcohol and drug use, we collect data on binge
drinking, any kind of drug or alcohol use on school property, and we ask
about the age in which they initiated these behaviors so we can report
on how many, and it\'s a frighteningly large number have started
drinking or trying marijuana before the age of 13.

Now there is a core set of items that are on the national survey, but we
leave space for the states and cities to determine if they want to add
their own items, and we have a long list of optional items. The problem
is it\'s very hard for those optional items to get on the national core
questionnaire, and it\'s not something we mandate.

That\'s something that, because the states have a vested interest in
what\'s on the national questionnaire, we really have a democratic
procedure, and they get a strong vote, so we have to sell it to the
states if you want to get new items into the national core questionnaire
for YRBS.

But here are some of the violence and drug-related optional items that
have been used: \"On school property, do you carry a gun?\" \"Have you
been harassed or bullied?\" \"Have you been hit, punched, or kicked?\"

There\'s been some interest in students cutting or burning themselves on
purpose. Use of prescription drugs is an interest, and what typically
happens is after it\'s used for a couple of cycles on some of the state
items, then some of the states try to sell the other states on getting
it into the national one.

There\'s also a fair amount of interest in asking questions related to
protective factors. That\'s been really challenging. These are some of
the optional items that have been used, really challenging for us,
because we haven\'t really been convinced that there\'s a good way to do
this in the brevity that\'s needed. Most of the really validated
questionnaires on protective factors are quite extensive and would not
fit into the one period mandate.

To bring this to life, let me show you some of the data. I\'m going to
show you national data, but every state and city that participates gets
this data, too.

This is an item I thought would be of interest, the percentage of high
school students who were in a physical fight on school property. You can
see that males are more likely than females, and black and Hispanic
students significantly more likely than white students to have been in a
fight on school property.

Here\'s the trend data. Since 1993 we started asking this, and you can
see very similar to some of the other violence items. It went down
across the 1990s and has been kind of flat since.

Now one of the really neat things about having this uniform system at
the national, state, and local level is being able to see the
differences when you\'re asked the same questions, and you can see the
range here among the states on this item from eight to 16 percent. In
the cities, there are lows that go down to ten percent and then highs as
much as 22 percent. Sometimes it\'s more interesting when you see a name
attached.

This is a different question, the percentage of high school students who
were offered, sold, or given an illegal drug by someone on school
property. You can see the median across the probably about 41 states
that participate is 26 percent. That\'s the median, but it\'s really
interesting to see which states.

Some states, the prevalence is twice as high as in the other states. You
can see Arizona, Maine, New Jersey are in the very high end, and Kansas,
Kentucky, and Oklahoma are at the lower end. What\'s causing these
differences we don\'t know, but it certainly raises a lot of interesting
questions.

And here\'s one that looks at the cities. This is the percentage of high
school students who did not go to school because of safety concerns. The
median is nine, and you can see cities like Boston, Dallas, and Miami
are below the median, and then other cities like Los Angeles, San
Bernardino, and New Orleans are considerably above the median, so these
kind of comparisons can be made with the uniform questioning.

Researchers do a lot of analyses of YRBS data, very interesting when you
can compare the associations across the different behaviors. These are
just a sample of some of the dozens and dozens if not hundreds of
articles that have been written. I have a one-pager that lists a number
of excellent articles that have been written and added to the field from
YRBS data.

The national, state, and city data that I\'ve been talking about is just
one component of our system. Periodically we do other surveys that ask
the same questions. In the 1990s we did a household-based survey, so we
were able to get at kids who were no longer in school or are home
schooled.

We did a college survey to ask the same questions of college students.
We did a survey of alternative high schools. You might not be surprised
to know that the risk behaviors were considerably higher there.

Special populations. We do surveys with the Bureau of Indian Affairs
schools. The Navajo Nation has done some excellent surveys, and we\'re
constantly doing psychometric studies to see whether the wording of the
questions, the setting, the mood of the questions, what kind of impact
that has on the results.

This is a website where you can get the questionnaires. You can get all
the reports, a bibliography of the articles, and there\'s a wonderful
interactive computer program called Youth Online, in which you can
actually download U.S. state and cities results and create your own
graphs, comparing your state to the national results, to other states,
and so forth.

I wanted to take just a couple of moments to talk to you not about YRBS
but about another system that we have that we do every other year, in
the even years when we\'re not doing YRBS. This is called School Health
Profiles. This does not look at youth risk behaviors. It looks at school
health policies and programs.

You know, when you\'re talking about \$100 million for all the states,
you\'re getting into the funding \-- you\'re getting into our funding
territory. That\'s close to the type of funding now that we at CDC give,
and we\'ve come to the realization that with that kind of money, if
we\'re talking about collecting data for accountability purposes, it\'s
just not fair to hold school programs accountable for making changes in
youth risk behaviors.

If we\'re giving a much more substantial amount of money, say, to a
health department to implement a comprehensive adolescent health program
of which the school program is just one piece, well, yes, by golly, I\'d
say hold them accountable for moving the youth risk behaviors.

But we\'re moving \-- while continuing to recognize the importance of
collecting data on youth risk behaviors for all the reasons mentioned
before, we\'re really moving in the direction of holding our funded
partners more accountable for changes in the number of schools that are
implementing the evidence-based policies and practices that our own
research syntheses have identified as being likely to be effective, and
it\'s largely through this system that we\'re able to get that data as
to what percent of schools in a given state or city are implementing the
evidence-based practices.

So School Health Profiles is conducted by state and local education and
health agencies every other year. It\'s a random sample, a
representative sample of secondary schools, and the questionnaires go
currently to the principals and the lead health education teacher.

We\'ve gotten better and better. Participation, we\'re up to 44 states
and 16 cities now and with more technical assistance, the number that
are getting weighted data will increase.

These are some of the sample topics that we ask about. \"What are you
teaching in health education?\" \"What teaching methods are you using?\"
\"What kind of professional preparation and staff development are your
teachers and health-related staff getting?\" \"Specifically what content
are you covering?\"

In terms of these key topics, for us, \"What are your policies related
to physical education, nutrition services?\" Asthma is an important
issue for us, so we collect data on that.

And then, in terms of violence prevention, these are some of the items.
This is very flexible. Unlike YRBs, we can readily make changes in this.
These are items that were judged to be of importance, so we can tell you
in the cities and states that participate what percent of the secondary
schools have closed campus, require school uniforms, use metal
detectors, and so on for any issue that\'s determined to be of
importance.

Just to bring it to life, to give you one sample item, I think we\'d all
probably agree that it\'s a good thing for schools to have registered
nurses on their campuses. What we see when we look at it at cities
across the nation is a tremendous variation.

We have a number of cities where that is the norm, and 80 to 90 percent
of the schools do have nurses full-time on campus, and then we have
other cities that are certainly no more economically or financially
challenged than the ones already mentioned, where it\'s like ten percent
of the schools, so really important insights that can come from this.

The competitive food issue is an important issue for all of us. This is
just a sample item, the percent of schools where they sell chocolate
candy bars, and it\'s similar no matter what type of junk food you look
at.

You see there\'s tremendous variation across states that because we\'re
asking the same questions, and because we\'re asking about policies and
practices, not just about behaviors, we can identify those states where
clearly it is the norm to allow students access to chocolate candy bars
and other states where that\'s not what the policy is.

So those are the two systems that we\'re using for accountability
purposes, the Youth Risk Behavior Survey to get at the behaviors and
School Health Profiles to get at policies and practices.

MR. LONG: Howell, thank you very much for that presentation, and next
we\'ll hear from Doug Hall, PRIDE.

MR. HALL: Thank you very much. The Los Alamos, New Mexico schools has
used the PRIDE survey since 1988, and using their data, school officials
in Los Alamos were able to detect an abnormally high number of eighth
grade girls \-- there were only 250 altogether \-- but an abnormally
high number of those eighth grades who had seriously considered suicide.

If it weren\'t for local data, not national or state data, the local
officials in that school system in Los Alamos would not have been
alerted to that problem, and it may have been too late before they took
action.

Since the eyes in the back of my head aren\'t working so well, if I\'m
on a slide that doesn\'t make sense, will someone let me know?

But PRIDE Surveys was founded in 1982 in Atlanta to measure local
adolescent alcohol and substance abuse problems. Since then we\'ve
conducted more than 32,000 building level surveys in all 50 states
involving ten million or more students. We offer surveys for parents and
faculty, as well.

Our clients include LEAs, SEAs, public health departments, criminal
justice agencies, community-based organizations, CSAP funded programs,
all sorts or programs across the board in the country.

Let me see if I did it. Yes.

We offer six surveys that are standard, so to speak, shelf products,
four for students, one for faculty and staff, and one for parents. We
also provided administration, support, data collection, and analysis for
a number of clients who bring us their own instrument.

Our student surveys collect the four core measures that have been
identified by HHS and ONDCP and which are also parts of the Principles
of Effectiveness. Bill spoke of those earlier. That is 30-day
prevalence, perceived risk, age of onset, and parental-peer disapproval.

We\'re also following the effort that Bill also mentioned on the uniform
data set in terms of the prevalence of alcohol, of drug use and
violence, and feel that our current questionnaires probably capture
about 90 percent of what we\'ve seen in the drafts of those uniform data
set effort that\'s coming along. As soon as those are made available,
we\'ll add the other ten percent.

Over the past 25 years, we have expanded our coverage beyond alcohol and
drugs, adding items that address school safety, carrying guns, gang
membership, bullying, school climate, suicide, obesity, risk and
protective factors, and character education.

Many schools use the data they receive from us to guide their school
improvement plans and to track AYP. Each school that conducts a PRIDE
Survey receives a report within two weeks, and this is the school
building level report that they will receive.

You\'ll see it\'s quite extensive. It weighs four pounds, so we don\'t
actually send them this thing. We send them \-- and I\'ve provided each
one of you \-- we send them a short executive summary printed and a CD
that\'s a hyperlink, so it\'s easy to navigate.

They can get their data. They can do the same as you spoke of Howell.
They can slice-and-dice their data, and that\'s what happened in Los
Alamos. If we don\'t report it in a standard fashion, they can come in
and look at their data and slice-and-dice their data.

The cost of this is \$1.35 per student.  That is less than .02 of one
percent of the average spending per student in the United States, so,
you know, it is an affordable feature.

We produce these reports routinely at the building level, the district
level, the county level, the regional level, state level, and national
level, so there\'s an array of data that\'s available.

I previously mentioned that some of the schools are using their data in
their school improvement plans and also to track annual yearly progress.
This is a selected item dictionary of our instruments that illustrates
those items on our instruments that directly relate to academic
achievement.

You\'ll notice if you can read this \-- I don\'t expect you to be able
to read this. I\'m showing it for illustration, but if you could
possibly read it, the very top one on the left hand is make good grades.
The next one down is skipping schools.

This goes through an array of items such as whether your teachers give
you praise when you do good work. So this is available online in case
you would like to look at it, but you\'ll see that there\'s quite a bit
of data that is collected by these schools that pertain to academic
achievement.

I\'ll only spend a little bit of time in this room, but you could back
and ask me, but how do we know these kids are telling the truth? We have
done research and development studies testing validity and reliability
on these instruments for over 25 years.

The most recently we completed in December of 2006 with 5,700 randomly
selected students in Brooklyn and Queens. The New York field test showed
that students in grades six, seven, and eight can complete the survey in
one class period and that risk and protective factor scales maintain
strong psychometric properties.

We\'ve done test-retest on, you know, on the instruments showing a 97
percent exact agreement on the prevalence of cocaine use. We include
internal checks in the instrument such as a fake drug and also validity
checks for internal consistency or inconsistency such as if a student
were to answer, \"I use all illegal drugs on a daily basis,\" that
questionnaire would be considered invalid.

And we do iteration checks. We look not only at our survey against other
surveys in the country but also how local state data compares against
itself over time, but you will see this is just one data point here
compared to the monitor in the future survey.

At the bottom, if you can read that, this is on, I believe, tenth grade
annual illicit drug use. We showed 29.7 percent, MTF 29.8 percent. This
is the same data point over seven years, comparing the PRIDE survey with
Monitoring the Future, and, as Howell mentioned earlier, we look at
YRBS. I should have been thoughtful enough to compare it to YRBS.

These surveys show fairly similar, not exact, findings. We don\'t have
the exact same questions or the exact same methodology, but as the old
research saying goes, \"Either someone is consistently telling the
truth, or they\'re consistently lying.\"

I want to get into a little data and the applicability at the local
level. One of the \-- Howell made the point, and I will iterate that
that it is not easy to get into schools and to ask them to conduct a
survey.

Oftentimes, the educators are concerned when someone wants to come in,
particularly from the outside, and conduct a survey that measures
antisocial behavior of the students. One of their concerns is the
adverse publicity that they might get.

This chart shows that they shouldn\'t have that concern. What our
surveys show consistently is that while there are drug problems in the
schools, drug problems are far more prevalent outside the schools.

As you can see, the green bar indicates the percentage of marijuana use
by twelfth graders at school, at nights, and on the weekends, the
tallest bar. A similar pattern, I might say, is found for buying and
selling drugs inside the school or outside the school and for carrying
guns. This is the next slide.

Adolescents are three times more likely to carry a gun outside of school
as a weapon or for protection. We\'re not talking about hunting guns in
this particular case. Armed with this data, we feel that educators,
particularly local educators, are able to say that the schools,
comparatively speaking, are safe and healthy environments.

I don\'t think I have to do that, do I? I can point it this way.

We all know that what parents think children do and what children do are
often two different things. The dark bars, the dark green bars, show the
percentage of self-reported eighth grade alcohol use on the left and
drug use on the right.

The light green bars represent the percentage of parents who say their
child uses alcohol and drugs. We think this data can help local
educators emphasize the important duty of parents to raise children who
are prepared to learn.

School officials using our faculty and staff survey \-- am I on that
one? Yes, I am \-- can also learn about their own personnel. The data in
the next two slides I\'m going to show you is aggregate national data.
It\'s not randomly selected, but when we conduct the survey on the local
level, we will do a population study of the faculty in that school, so
therefore we would be talking about representative date. So I\'m showing
you this for example.

These are the training needs of students \-- of faculty and parents
related to alcohol and drug issues, and you\'ll see that it\'s
two-thirds or more of the faculty and staff tell us that they need
training in these issues. I might add we have done \-- we have cut this
data for schools, because the issue comes up that the certified
personnel say, \"Oh, that\'s just the non-certified people.\"

Well, it doesn\'t work out that way. Both the certified and the
non-certified personnel show these needs, as well as, in the next slide,
you\'ll see an even greater percent say that they are in need of
training in issues related to violence prevention such as recognizing
the early signs.

I hope I\'ve been able to show you in this little presentation that
local data is being collected and being put to effective use, that the
data is vital to the Safe and Drug-Free Schools Program, that the data
is rich and reliable and useful and affordable, and it\'s available
within just two weeks.

I hope you\'ll also remember my opening story about those little girls
in New Mexico. I think if there were a argument to be made for why there
needs to be this capture of this local data, I can\'t think of a better
reason.

I want to go back to a question that was asked before we came forward.
No, the state grants portion of Drug-free Schools does not pay Georgina
Williams, the prevention specialist in Los Alamos schools, her salary,
but without that, this issue would not be on Georgina\'s plate, and
that\'s what makes it very important.

Thank you very much.

MR. LONG: Thank you very much, Doug, and now if we could enter into the
segment of time when we have questions and enter actually into a
conversation. Russell.

MR. JONES: Yes. Thanks so much for your excellent presentations, very,
very informative. I\'m familiar with the CDC\'s instrument. When I was a
member of the number of committees there in the early nineties and up
until probably 2003, we vetted that particular instrument, and I see
that it\'s doing very good things.

But I had a number of questions, and I won\'t ask them all, but since I
had a question just before our previous speaker left, and unfortunately,
I didn\'t ask that question because we ran out of time, so I\'m going to
get my questions in this time as quickly as possible.

But there was a \-- you made a statement earlier about the lack of
correlation with the data that are begin collected and outcome measures,
Bill, and I\'m wondering can you say a little bit more about that?

I mean, I\'m just trying \-- I\'m just trying to get some clarity in
terms of the data that are being collected here on fairly
psychometrically sound instrument and seem to be correlated with some
outcome measures, achievement, et cetera. So I\'m just trying to get
some clarity on that statement that you \--

MR. MODZELESKI: Nothing that Doug is collecting or Howell is collecting
or Mike is collecting relates back to a specific program. It relates
back to an accumulation of things that are being done at the school, at
the community, in the churches, so forth and so on.

So, you know, you could take Los Alamos, you know, Doug\'s question and
say, you know, what created crime to go up or down, you know, and you
could use the data to show it has gone up or it has gone down, but you
can\'t point a finger and say it\'s because of the mentoring program or
whatever the case may be.

So you could use that data to go back and say, \"We\'re doing the right
things.\" You know, \"Here are the ten things we\'re doing, and look,
we\'ve been doing these ten things for five years, and crime is
constantly going down,\" so we could say that, but we can\'t point our
finger and say specifically this or specifically that.

So it gives us a good overview of what\'s happening at the local level
with the PRIDE survey, at the state level with the YRBSS. And, by the
way, is that Pennsylvania \-- Howell mentioned Pennsylvania and
Virginia. They are collecting data, albeit not through YRBSS.

Pennsylvania has their own survey, and Virginia has a \-- Virginia had a
lot of problems with going out and requesting \-- again, this is getting
back to getting permission to use survey at the state level, so Virginia
has a web-based \--

They\'re not collecting everything that everybody else is. They are
collecting some things. Pennsylvania is collecting more, I mean, so
those are two different \-- it\'s not that they\'re doing anything. So
that\'s the biggest issue.

MR. JONES: So what is the reason for the lack of connection between
outcome and the data that are being collected? I mean, is that
methodological? Is it financial? Is it philosophical or \-- I\'m not
sure.

MR. MODZELESKI: All the above.

MR. JONES: All of the above.

MR. MODZELESKI: All of the above. MR. JONES: Yes, and how do we attack
that? I mean, I think one of the most important things this Committee
could do or recommend is a linkage between these data sets and outcomes.
Let me be more specific, the linkage of these data sets and programs
that are presently being engaged by No Child Left Behind and Safe and
Drug-Free Schools. I mean, how do you \--

MR. MODZELESKI: I\'ll let Howell and others talk about that.

MR. JONES: Okay.

MR. MODZELESKI: I will say that we\'ve had experience with this going
back now well over eight years. We\'ve had some of the best
methodologists and researchers in the world come to the table and begin
to have this discussion about that, and they\'ve all told us the same
thing is that basically it\'s almost impossible to take a discrete
program and then, say, take that program back unless it\'s evaluated as
a discrete program, but basically say that this program is attributable
to these results, especially in those communities or those schools where
there\'s a lot of different programs going on. And what we know from
Denise Goddferdson\'s work is that basically every school in this
country is doing not a program but multiple programs.

So our sort of substitute for that, and this is after the first part,
was agreement on the part of OMB and Department of Education to take a
look or a list of programs which we know have been effected, contribute
to a certain effect size, provided, as Mike said, is that they were
implemented with a degree of fidelity.

And so that\'s being used as a substitute where we\'re saying is,
\"Okay, how many schools are engaged in these programs, A, that we know
are effective?\" B is to then go back and say, \"How many are then
implementing these programs with a high degree of fidelity, so we know
that, or we could assume, that we\'re going to get a certain outcome?\"
So that\'s the best that we have been able to do, these, you know, tying
data sets back to particular programs.

MR. JONES: So what are we \-- do we know what we\'re finding? And I\'m
wondering to what extent does \-- is Congress aware, and what do they
make of these kind of linkages?

MR. MODZELESKI: I think there is an acceptance now. I mean, the OMB has
accepted these type of linkages. I mean, provided that we could put them
forward, OMB has clearly said that we\'re willing to accept that as part
of the measurement for the part.

And there are some draft, which I can\'t talk about, but hopefully
within the next month or so we should have some preliminary data on
where schools are on doing some of these things. I mean, there\'s some
good news, and there\'s some not so good news as we look at it.

MR. JONES: I\'m sorry. Just one last follow-up to that. Then are there
budgetary priorities? Let me put it another way. To what extent is
budget tied to findings from the connectivity of these data sets and
outcome studies? I mean, is there appreciation of kind of the pre-morbid
functioning and the \--

MR. MODZELESKI: Yes. The short answer is yes. I mean, there\'s been
agreement. You know, the other agreement is that we have made some, I
think, some significant strides with OMB on recognizing the fact that
some of the stuff that we are measuring and, you know, we have about
seven performance measures for the national program. Many of them come
from the YRBSS, and so if YRBSS indicates that there\'s been a reduction
in alcohol and drug use and violence, we take credit for it.

Now, fortunately, the data, the trend line, has been moving either on a
straight line or downward, but at some point in time, and I think
anybody that\'s been involved with this for a long period of time
realizes is that trend line moves up and down.

It does not continuously move down, and we all know that, and, you know,
we don\'t want to sit here or be able to sit here and say just because
it\'s going up it\'s attributed to a lack of influence or a lack of
proper programming on the part of local school districts.

There\'s a lot more to it than just merely what we do as far as our
programs or our dollars. I think that that\'s where we have to begin to
dig down and make that connection between specific programs and specific
outcomes, which we don\'t have.

And we clearly recognize is that the type of evaluation that Shep has
done with his program can be done, but it\'s a costly endeavor, I mean,
and so we\'d like to take programs like the good behavior game and say
is that if it\'s done in this particular way, in this particular manner,
this is the outcome that you can be expected to receive. That\'s a lot
cheaper and a lot easier to do than going back and constantly evaluating
these programs.

MS. TAFT: Thank you for this presentation and for telling me about the
School Health Profiles that CDC does. I didn\'t realize that you all did
those, that kind of survey in your off years.

I\'m looking at the chart that you put up of sample topics, and it says
tobacco use prevention, but it doesn\'t say anything about alcohol and
drug, other drug use prevention, and I wondered if that was also
included, because that might help inform what programs out there are
being used.

MR. WECHSLER: We ask about alcohol and other drug use in our national
survey, which is called School Health Policies and Program Study that we
get to do every six years, and that\'s coming out. The 2006 results are
coming out in the fall.

I don\'t believe we currently \-- we\'ve been gradually increasing the
amount of topics, and because alcohol and drug use is not something that
has fallen largely in our domain at CDC, that\'s something that\'ll get
added in later rather than sooner, but it\'ll get on there eventually.

MS. TAFT: I think most everybody on this Committee would urge a sooner
rather than later addition.

MR. WECHSLER: Well, these things cost, and we have to \-- you know, we
have financial resources from other categorical programs that are
targeting the other issues that have contributed to building up the
system, so it costs.

MR. LONG: Next, Shep, first of all, welcome back, and then Dennis.

MR. KELLAM: Well, I\'m back. I want to call attention to a very major
and important distinction, and Russell raised it, and so did Susan, and
Tommy did indirectly, Tommy Ledbetter, when he was saying, well, you do
the third grade, first through third grade, you know, with the Reading
First, and then what the hell happens by high school. They don\'t stay
that way.

Well, maybe they do. Maybe they don\'t. In order to find out over time
how kids do, which is what I want to make a distinction about, you have
to measure the same kid over time with a unique identifier.

Now the data systems we\'re talking about here are management
information systems, technically, and they, in fact, give you an
aggregate measure at points of time across populations. You can, in
fact, do both. Indeed, the school district does a growth model data
gathering on grades.

They collect Charlie\'s grades, kindergarten through the entire course
of schooling. Many of the counties and districts have, in fact, such
personal information systems and would lend themselves to the kind of
growth that we heard earlier.

Just as I was walking in, David, you know, I didn\'t get the name of the
person who was talking about it. We were hearing about schools in
certain states being provided opportunity to follow kids over time, not
just about grades, but also about behavior, psychological, physical,
other parameters of health.

And it\'s those kinds of complementarities between the management
information system which gives you aggregate data, aggregated at
different kinds of configurations, school building, school districts,
states, and so on, compared to the growth curve kind of perspective.

In a growth curve perspective, you can, in fact, have some kids try the
standard program with innovation and other kids try the standard program
without an innovation and discover over time what happens to the kids
who got the innovation, and that\'s what we do.

In randomized field trials that are population based, we define a
population and give it to some kids in some sampling frame, randomized
or otherwise, and we compare it to the other kids. So it\'s extremely
important for us to understand that distinction.

Another issue is that management information systems generally start
relatively later than the kinds of developmental epidemiologic kinds of
data systems we\'re talking about as the alternative or complementary
alternative.

For example, we know a lot about early antecedents in first grade and
earlier, in infancy, even, about the earlier antecedents of school
failure, of attention problems, of drug abuse, of tobacco use, of a
whole variety of outcomes.

There is more knowledge about boys than there is about girls for some
reasons that we don\'t understand. It took us a long time to start
studying girls developmentally, you know, in the research field.

So, in fact, when you talk about prevention, you want to, in fact,
entertain the possibility of going earlier than grade four even, let
alone middle school, and talk about these early antecedents as potential
targets for intervention. And, indeed, The Society for Prevention
Research every year has programs which start earlier and, in fact, do
show impact with rigorous designs, you know, that we can use to
understand outcomes that Russell was asking about.

The management information systems do not disaggregate programs, but
worse, they don\'t follow the same kids over time necessarily. It\'s an
aggregation across populations.

They tell you what\'s going on, and in some sense we\'re smitten for a
variety or reasons not to join the developmental epidemiology that the
schools use with health indicators over time that other people use,
although some population data does exist developmentally over time.

We need to understand the uses of both and understand how one is far
more informative about what works and what doesn\'t for which kids,
because basically you\'re interested in changing the developmental
trajectories of kids, improving the developmental trajectories. That
means following kids over time. I throw that for the start of a
conversation, not the end of it.

MR. LONG: I am not going to have you repeat that, Shep. Dennis?

MR. ROMERO: Thank you very much. Thank you to the three panelists. I
think your information is just extremely helpful, and especially as
we\'re moving into more of a decision-driven, data decision-driven
focus, it only makes sense to use data as we make our decisions, and my
comment first is to Doug Hall. I would be very curious to see how YRBS
falls in that comparison between Monitoring the Future and PRIDE, so
I\'d love to see that.

My question, I think, Shep might have answered it to some extent, but
what is the number one difficulty or stumbling block that you experience
in trying to gather the data or trying to get a picture of the
communities or the schools or the state? What would be the one issue
that you find difficult to get at?

MR. HALL: I think it probably would be the perceived administrative
burden of doing this, of conducting a survey in the schools, and I use
the perceived. For example, the instrument that we tested in Brooklyn
and Queens is a modified version of the original 12-page Communities
That Care Youth Survey that originated with SAMHSA.

We hired Jack Pollard from the University of Washington, who is now
actually our Senior Research Analyst, and Jack had had a great deal of
experience in the creation of the original CTC Survey. And what we
looked at is how could we eliminate some questions, items that perhaps
weren\'t needed.

The reason for that is the perception in the mind of the school
administrator that the 12-page paper instrument was a burden on the
school system, and all of the research has said that students could
complete the 12-page CTC original instrument with very little problem of
item missingness, some, but very little problem of item missingness in
the allotted classroom time.

But the perception was that it couldn\'t occur, so it didn\'t matter
what the statistics or the research said. The perception was it was not
possible, so we created an instrument that is a four-page instrument,
eliminating items that, one, did not show a high correlation or showed a
lower correlation to alcohol and drug use, instruments that local
community groups or local school systems would probably be hard put to
change.

It might be more the role of the mayor or the governor of the state or
the President of the United States, so the local organization could not
affect some redundancy and also a few of the items that might create
some sort of \"political\" with a small \"p\" problem. Family management
is one of the areas where oftentimes school administrators are not
willing to have those type of questions asked in the school room.

What we have found is that by producing a four-page instrument versus a
12-page instrument, it\'s about \-- you know, the schools that select
we\'ll offer, \"Here\'s what \-- you can use this or this.\" The schools
that select, it\'s about six to one that will go with the four-page, so
it removes the burden, you know, or the perceived burden, I would say.

As I tried to point out in my discussion, there is a perceived cost.
\"Oh, analysis or data collection is horribly expensive. You can\'t do
that, you know. Schools don\'t have the money.\"

Protection of participants is an issue. The active parental consent is a
problem with some schools. They simply don\'t \-- schools don\'t want to
do a student survey in the first place, and then you say on top of that
you\'ll have to get active parental permission to do this. This layers
another burden on top of the schools.

So all of these are what I would call \-- many of them are perceived,
though, and schools that are doing the active parental permission and
doing a good job are getting fairly good response back, but it is a
burden.

Those are some of the problems. What we try to do is \-- a few slides I
showed \-- we try to work with administrators to show what the benefits,
you know, the public relations benefits can be of conducting these
surveys.

And then there is the financial aspect. Hope knows this well. We conduct
the survey for the Greater Cincinnati Coalition, and they feel that
having the data has allowed them to leverage about \$14 million in
funding for that coalition, and without that data they feel that people
would not have come to the table.

So that is a small price to pay for such a great benefit in terms of the
financial benefit. So one of the things we\'re trying to do is to work
with overcoming these problems with the schools, and that was one of the
\-- the topic of our workshop at the CADCA conference was it was called
\"Let\'s Play Nice,\" and we put school people and Coalition people
together to try to overcome those obstacles.

MR. LONG: Are you going to answer the Ohio part, or did you have a
different \-- because Susan \-- that\'s the reason I was asking. Okay.
Susan. That\'s why I asked.

MS. KEYS: Thank you. I just wanted to follow up with a clarification to
something that Shep said. I did not understand when heard the
presentation about the growth model that there were indicators other
than academic indicators that were being collected, so I\'m not sure
that health indicators are a part of it.

It\'s only academic performance, and although the potential exists, I\'m
not sure that we heard that they\'re taking full advantage of that
potential by linking back from the student performance to what the
actual interventions were or possibly looking at dosage and mobility and
those kinds of factors.

So it appeared to me that it was looking at only individual level data
to see whether individuals were improving performance over time only. So
I just wanted to clarify that, because I think that there is potential
for doing something different, but I don\'t think that they\'re using
that full potential.

MR. LONG: Thank you, Sue. Hope, Russell, Shep.

MS. TAFT: Thank you. We\'ve heard a lot of information from the
Department about how they can identify the schools that are most in need
and the schools that need extra help, whether it\'s persistently
dangerous or failing schools or schools that are in makeover or whatever
you want to call it.

And a lot of this is based on No Child Left Behind information, and I
was wondering how that is tied into the national grant program for Safe
and Drug-Free Schools, since you all spend more money on the National
Grant Program than you do on the states grant Program and wondered if
there was a tie-in to using the data that you get to on which schools
are in the most trouble with the funding that goes out.

MR. MODZELESKI: The answer is yes. I mean, for every discretionary grant
program there is a section which is called need, and the applicable
agency, be it an LEA or a private not-for-profit, has to describe their
need, you know, in several terms, you know, whether it\'s alcohol and
drug use or truancy or violence or whatever the case may be.

So there is a section in the discretionary grant which talks about need.
That need is measured many different ways, but nevertheless it is a
significant part of every application.

MS. TAFT: Having written some of those grants, you can \-- I know that
an area can make themselves look very needy, and I wondered if that is
correlated to other data that you have within the Department.

MR. MODZELESKI: If you\'re asking whether or not, you know, say, for a
PEP grant, the physical education where you get hundreds and hundreds,
you know, 700, 800 applications, whether you look at a standard, whether
it comes from, say, Centers for Disease Control or not and then say,
\"Let\'s measure against the standard,\" the answer is no.

MS. TAFT: Okay. It seems to me there could be a connection there. Also,
looking at the PRIDE Survey and knowing from other surveys that I am
familiar with there is a \-- there should be a great link between
schools and communities, because most of the negative behavior activity
happens outside of the school building or the school property, and I
wondered if there was anything in the reauthorization of No Child Left
Behind that would make that link between school and community more
specific and firmer.

MR. MODZELESKI: Not at the present time, because at the present time, as
Holly mentioned this morning, is that it\'s formula-driven to the state
but not formula-driven from the state down to the location education
agencies.

MS. TAFT: So there\'s no way that you could say one of the things that
would be valued would be a school-community coalition link or anything
like that?

MR. MODZELESKI: Well, I think, Hope, I think the answer is yes, I mean,
and the other thing that Holly mentioned this morning is that the
specifics of this, you know, what we call the specs haven\'t been
developed as of yet, so a lot of that can be developed.

All I\'m saying is that the formula as it\'s now, you know, derived is
that we\'ll go from the federal government down to the states, and then
from there it will not be formula-driven down. Now, there\'s a lot that
can be done, and, for example, is that we could consider is that as
these dollars are at the state level and that they go from the state
level to selected LEAs that the going down to the selected LEAs will be
based upon certain criteria.

One of those criteria, if you look at the revised part, has to be need,
has to be need measured in several different ways, but that\'s going to
have to be \-- that\'s going to have to be part of it. The other part
can be.

I\'m not saying, and we haven\'t had this discussion yet, but it\'s
conceivable that as dollars or resources or services go from the state
down to the local level, it\'s based on need.

It\'s also based upon the willingness of an LEA to do certain things to
ensure effectiveness such as collaboration with the community, whether
it\'s community, formal community groups or informal groups, but
nevertheless that whole collaboration part, which is absolutely key, I
mean, because schools can\'t do it by themselves.

MS. TAFT: And just to follow up on that, I mean, I know that you were
talking about the state, the formula grant, but in our discretionary
grant programs, the majority of those programs have a strong tie to
collaboration with the community.

The majority of our grants go directly to the LEA. A couple of them can
go to community-based organizations, but collaboration with the
community is intertwined in most of our discretionary grant programs.

I guess my whole issue is, you know, you have all this good data that\'s
derived from various sources. How is the Department using that to inform
their decision-making?

MS. PRICE: We use it as best we can. I don\'t know how else to say
without being specific. You know, you mentioned about in the
discretionary grant programs and the application process of tying it to
need, and in that review of those applications, as Bill mentioned, the
PEP Grant, it doesn\'t get 600 or 700 applications a year. Last year we
got 1,160 and funded 56.

So, you know, we do try to review and look at those and see that \-- I
don\'t know what the right term for it is. There\'s honest
representation on their grant application of what the circumstances
actually are, but, you know, there\'s limitations within the work that a
staff person can do to verify those relationships, but we do as best we
can to try to incorporate the data, the use of the data in our grant
applications. Going forward, can we do a better job? Probably so.

MR. MODZELESKI: Debbie, I\'d also add that much of the data that I
talked about and Howell\'s data, although it doesn\'t apply to Doug\'s
data, is the state level data, and the applications come in from not
only local school districts but sometimes local school districts on
behalf of individual schools, and so therefore it\'s hard to take the
national data or the state data and then use that at the local level.

The problem that we see, and Susan and I have had this discussion as
part of the Safe Schools Healthy Students, is that oftentimes is that
some of these programs go to a school district and within the school
district go to particular schools. For example, you want prevention
programs to begin in the elementary schools, and so you\'re driving your
dollars to the elementary schools.

The need, however, if you look at need factors and you only pull out
need, is you don\'t see a whole lot of alcohol and drug use or violence,
especially if you compare that to the secondary schools, so these are
issues we\'re trying to work through is that, you know, we know it needs
to go there, but the need can\'t be manifested.

We also need that locals are going to present data. Sometimes they
present state data, but more often they present some local data, and
that local data gets back into the reason why we\'re doing the common
core at the national level is because at the local level it\'s very
difficult to compare data that may be submitted by Cincinnati to data
that\'s submitted by Chattanooga, because while they may be trying to
say the same thing, is the data is very, very different, and it\'s hard
for comparability purposes to compare one to the other.

MR. JONES: Yes. A couple of questions, one to Bill and then just two
quick questions for the panel. You know, I\'m hearing a number of very
excellent questions that are being raised, and, you know, the most
recent was by Hope, just the extent to which the data that are being
collected are being used to inform decisions that the Department is
making.

And I\'m just wondering. You mentioned that there had been some time
where a group of methodologists had come together and discussed various
data sets, issues, et cetera, and I\'m just wondering the extent to
which that group continues to convene and grapples with some of the
issues that are presently being discussed.

MR. MODZELESKI: It comes together at several different levels, and the
level that it comes together most frequently is on the common core data
definitions, and that\'s a \-- that meets on a regular basis. I will say
is that the data is used to make decisions.

One of the ways it\'s used is to basically look at programming. You
know, do we put our dollars into X, Y, or Z? You know, if you have drug
use, especially if it\'s going up in a particular area, we may want to
consider putting dollars in there.

Now that becomes a little bit difficult, because we don\'t like to
categorize some of these things and say, \"Let\'s just develop a program
for methamphetamine use,\" when that may be going up in certain areas
but not all areas. Again, it gets away from this whole looking at this,
looking at risk factors and protective factors and try to do it
globally.

I would say that the \-- go back to the point is that right now under
the part, there are measures related to alcohol and drug use, as well
\-- well, alcohol, drug use, and violence use that we\'re being held
against as far as the overall effectiveness of the State Grant Program,
so it\'s being used in that way. Now we could have a whole discussion
about whether or not that\'s fair or not fair, but nevertheless that\'s
where we are today.

MR. JONES: I guess I was asking a more basic question, you know, just
the use of certain data sets, you know, the management information
perspective as opposed to the longitudinal curve growth model data, just
the relative usage of those types of data information gathering sets and
then their relative merit.

I don\'t \-- but their relative application to the various programs that
the Department of Education is encouraging. So, it\'s a \-- you know,
it\'s a more basic question.

MR. MODZELESKI: Let me give you two examples is that in the booklet that
you have, the one on the indicators, the very first chart that\'s in
there, I believe it\'s chart number one, is the chart on
school-associated violent deaths, and that, I believe the last data that
we\'ve collected with Howell\'s colleagues down at the injury branch,
you know, is that there were 21 school-associated violent deaths.

If you take a look at that data and you compare that data to, say,
bullying data or you compare it to truancy data, I mean, there is \--
because of the high visibility of those cases, there is what I call in
many respects the knee jerk reaction to put all your money into police
officers, SROs, medical detectors, cameras, or whatever the case may be.

So we try to paint a picture of saying, \"This is the picture. Nobody
should tolerate 21 deaths, but on the other hand, look at the tens of
thousands, hundreds of thousands if you believe some surveys, millions
of kids who have basically been bullied, picked on, intimidated,
threatened, harassed, who aren\'t going to school.

So you look at that from the general perspective. I call it the 30,000
feet perspective. I\'m saying is that as we develop programs, these
can\'t be programs that are merely focused on the law enforcement side.

They\'re important, but, however, you can\'t ignore those other things,
and that\'s where the data basically generally pushes it. So that\'s
one, I think, one clear example of how we use the data to push
programming.

MR. JONES: Thank you. Just a follow-up question. I\'m just wondering the
extent to which the data that are collected, to what degree, or maybe I
should ask how are the data used to inform evidence-based or
evidence-informed intervention strategies and to what extent does that
impact \-- well, I\'ll leave that part of it off.

Yes, but so just real basically to what extent do the data that you
folks are collecting inform the use of evidence, informed or
evidence-based intervention strategies?

MR. WECHSLER: The evidence we collect and the data we collect in terms
of our risk behaviors really are to set priorities, to guide broad
policy decisions, not to design a specific intervention.

Sometimes they\'re included. Some very impressive interventions actually
use YRBS data to try to teach children about norms so that they, you
know, correct misperceptions that the great majority of kids are using
drugs or alcohol or whatever. So that\'s one way that it\'s used, but
basically it\'s to set priorities, to decide where to put resources.

On the other hand, when we\'re looking at collecting data on school
practices, those practices are derived largely from evidence of
interventions that have been shown to be effective, so we wanted to see
to what extent our schools implementing those practices that quality
evaluations have shown to be effective.

MR. JONES: I\'m sorry. And do we have data on that? Does the CDC have
data?

MR. WECHSLER: Data on what?

MR. JONES: On the last point that you made. You were saying that \--
well, I\'m sorry.

MR. WECHSLER: If we know, if we can come to a scientific consensus over
what are the effective practices, which we\'ve been able to do in some
fields, then we can design items that can be collected in these kinds of
surveys. To that extent, we have, yes.

MR. JONES: yes, I\'d certainly like to get my hands on some of that. You
know, and then just going back to the policy, you\'re saying that your
data are used to impact policy, and do we know what \-- so policy
related to the Department of Education, but more specifically, the No
Child Left Behind and the Safe and Drug-Free Schools initiative.

So do we \-- are those data being used to develop policy within this
group, within this sphere, within the Department of Education?

MR. WECHSLER: I think that would be an interesting question for Mike \--

MR. JONES: Okay.

MR. WECHSLER: \-- at the state level.

MR. Herrmann: First off, in terms of using data, you know, local LEAs
are required to conduct a needs assessment, and on the application we
ask them to tell us what are the needs that are identified. Okay.
Directly below that section we ask them to tell us the strategies that
they propose to implement as a result of those needs assessments.

So what we do then, in reviewing the application, is there a connection
between this need that was identified, these risk factors, and the
strategy that was selected to use the Title IV funds for. So I think
that\'s the most clear-cut sort of connection between the data, if you
will, and the strategy.

Now I think the thing that\'s important to recognize is all this data
that we\'ve been talking about is really not risk factors. I mean, you
know, what we\'re really talking about is incident data that\'s kind of,
you know, two or three steps down the road from what we are really sort
of targeting the strategies at.

A point that I wanted to make, because we missed it and it\'s related to
Shep\'s inquiry, I think, I think we\'re really, in terms of data
collection, we\'re kind of on the verge of being at a whole new level of
collecting and being able to use data.

I think historically we\'ve collected data about issues, incidents,
problems, whatever, that\'s been centered around the particular problem,
but more and more we\'re moving to a data management system that is
centered around the student.

And once we make that move from being centered on the problem to being
centered on the student, then I think questions about, you know, what
kinds of interventions were introduced and what kind of effect did they
have, I think all that\'s going to sort of roll out of it.

But we\'re kind of at this stage right now where we\'ve got more data
than we know what to do with. We haven\'t figured out how to use it in a
way that really benefits students, but I think we\'re getting closer.

I think the challenge is our folks, like you, the researchers, are they
in touch with the folks within the departments that are really pulling
this management system together so that, you know, once some of these
basic bugs get worked out, and the basic system gets in place, are we
going to be in a place where we can move pretty quickly to use that
information.

MR. HALL: I would like to just add another dimension to this. The
instruments that we offer do get to causation. The original PRIDE Survey
instrument, which is a one-page, you know, front and back instrument,
was looked at by SDRG at the University of Washington, and they
identified 55 risk and protective factor items on the original
instrument that appeared in 1982.

Using that data, evaluators are able to look at performance outcomes.
Now what we \-- we don\'t provide that evaluation service, but most of
the people who use our instruments do so voluntarily.

That\'s probably 90 percent, you know. There may be a few out there that
have the gun to their head, but, you know, there\'s not many, so most of
the people use this voluntarily as part of an overall assessment or
evaluation aimed at getting performance outcomes.

For example, we collect data that\'s provided to the SIG Grants in three
states and a number of others. A number of the grantees under the
national programs that receive the Safe School Healthy Students use
PRIDE data as part of their evaluation.

So I wanted to sort of \-- there was something out there that sort of
seemed like, well, this is not being connected, but it is. I would say
the difference is it\'s being collected on a sporadic basis across the
country. This is not something that\'s been done universally in every
single school system and every state but is being done in many schools
systems throughout the United States.

Would we like to see it in every place? Of course, you know. I mean,
that was, you know, the \-- that was the whole idea behind the
introduction of our questionnaire in 1982.

As you know, if you look back historically at that time, people were out
attempting to make interventions and prevention on alcohol and drug
issues without any data at all except the Monitoring the Future, which
wasn\'t applicable at the local level.

So I think that is being done. We would help. We would support any
effort to try to see how we could standardize that or make it closer to
a standardization. We know that there are enormous challenges in doing
that, but that would be the goal is if we could somehow as a nation
collect data that would guide every single program in every single
program in the country. That would be the goal.

MR. LONG: If we could go with Shep and then Tommy, and then if we bring
this segment to a close.

MR. KELLAM: I like Mike\'s optimistic view that we\'re on the verge of
reinventing the information systems we\'ve got so that they\'re useful
to kids program decisions and help us integrate health and education,
and child welfare you could throw in, as well.

We are, I think, in this group in the business of trying to lay out some
kind of a map of where we go from here, pulling together education,
prevention, and information and policymaking into one thing.

We\'ve got an enormous array of separate information systems out there.
I mean, they\'re all over the place, and we haven\'t really learned to
use the data in the interest of how you run the school, or how do you
teach a kid, or how do you get inside the kid\'s head and think about
self-interest, risk behaviors, and the like.

We know that, for example, early mal-adapting to school in the form of
jumping around, breaking rules, and fighting, particularly among boys,
is a huge risk factor for later drug abuse and violent behavior and the
like. On the other hand, it\'s also an enormous risk factor for poor
achievement and school failure.

So we know these \-- in the kids, these early risks are all integrated.
The information system the school gathers regularly is, in fact, a
developmental epidemiologically potentially useful information system.
It follows Charlie over time and across schools in many school
districts.

Not all school districts have a computerized tracking system, but many
do, and so we have that precedent when it comes to following grades and
even some behavioral issues like suspension and expulsion. It\'s on that
developmental record.

So it\'s not like we\'re starting from scratch, but then we have to
somehow see how we can connect up to and make universal language with
the kind of things that are collected in the YRBSS and PRIDE and the
like so that they, in fact, do relate to a potential for making policy
decisions.

I think that the next generation which we should lay out might say
something like this, that we\'ve got now the beginnings of education
management information systems in every state as part of no kid gets
left behind, and we haven\'t learned how to use that data, either,
except to blame the school and not give them any money to fix anything,
let alone methods.

So that management information system, though, that tells us how well
the states are doing and the school buildings are doing can be used to
map where the problems are, the hot spots. That\'s the function of
demographic epidemiology, show you where the trouble is and something
about the qualities of the trouble.

There\'s a second level where you begin to take that apart and look more
intensively with proper sampling at what are the causal issues that
bring about those hot spots. That\'s the second level, and there we can
use data like we\'ve got, management information system. It borders on
meeting developmental data, as well.

The third level is where we\'re following kids over time and trying out
programs in some systematic fashion like randomization or something that
does the trick in that regard so that we can test what works and under
what circumstances for which kids.

Those are three levels, and they manage to integrate these different
kinds of information systems potentially. So I think that we need to
keep thinking about how these data systems can be applied to outcomes
and can be applied to policy, as Russell has been pushing.

I was optimistic. Susan corrected my misapprehensions about where you
were in the process of moving toward following kids over time. One of
the things that we have to be aware of is what Dennis raised, and that
is that this all requires an enormous amount, and Hope\'s been talking
about this since I met you.

It\'s got to do with the partnerships, the partnerships between the
community, including health and the school building and the researchers
who can, in fact, help look for a shared vision, because the way you get
these information systems integrated to policy and integrated at all
anyway is to have a partnership which sees mutual self-interest in all
that happening.

I mean, we\'ve been working inside Baltimore\'s school district for 30
\-- I don\'t know how many years, since the early eighties. We\'ve been
doing randomized field trials, doing all kinds of stuff.

Ninety-five percent of parents give us written consent to do this stuff,
you know, assigning kids to classrooms and so on. They do it out of
mutual interest and working through trust.

So the partnership becomes critical and bringing these information
systems together and bringing the institutions together in this next
generation of work, where information really is at these three levels,
you know, down to the level of what works for which kids over time and
is applicable to policies.

So somehow we\'ve got to sketch out a framework, and, in fact, the
Secretary, David, you know, raised that when she visited us. So you keep
talking about an integrated information system. Is anybody going to let
you do that? You know, what are the political problems?

Well, this is a serious issue, so how do you protect kids? But we\'re
already doing it in part, and something\'s been keeping us from bringing
things together. At the next stage I think we ought to try to map it
out.

MR. LEDBETTER: Doug made reference a moment ago about some problems with
collecting data where you use surveys and so forth, that school
administrators sometimes don\'t want to participate in some of these
things. I don\'t disagree with you, okay. I\'ll say that up front, but I
want you to understand how we think.

When we talk about school accountability, and that\'s what No Child Left
Behind is all about, basically, it\'s about accountability. That
accountability starts with the principal of the school or the headmaster
or whatever the terminology might be, and it goes down.

If the principal is being held accountable for the school, for the
progress of the school, then that principal holds those teachers at that
school accountable for what happens in those classrooms. Those teachers
want to protect their instructional time. If they\'re being accountable
for what happens in their classroom, then they\'re very protective of
their instructional time.

Therefore, that principal is pretty protective of that instructional
time, also, and principals nationwide today are more protective of the
instructional time than ever before in the history of this nation, and
that\'s not a bad thing. Okay, that\'s not a bad thing, but I just
wanted you to know that all of this kind of fits together.

Sometimes we may appear that we\'re in conflict with each other. Being
able to take a survey and reduce it to 45 minutes, that\'s great, but
from our perspective it would be better if you could reduce it to 25
minutes, you know, because as the teachers are concerned about their
instructional day, and from state to state the number of instructional
days vary from state to state.

There\'s no standardization across the United States about how many
instructional days, and that time has become so important to those
classroom teachers. Therefore, it has become so important to those
principals that it\'s not that they don\'t want to go in there and get
that information.

It\'s just a matter of \-- just a matter of principle to them that they
need to protect as much of that instructional time as they can and make
certain that instruction is actually taking place in those classrooms,
and that\'s the reason.

MR. HALL: Thank you, Tommy. We are aware that that is a big problem, and
I think I should have said that earlier and was maybe doing it in a very
roundabout way when I was discussing how we were reducing the length. I
think we are acutely aware of that issue, of time on task or time off
task, and we appreciate your comment. Thank you.

MR. LONG: And with that we will bring this segment to a close, and with
that, first of all, even though, and I said this, we\'ve had three of
our presenters that have been with us for months and months. I\'d like
to take this opportunity, Howell, thank you very much, Mike, Bill, and
Doug. Let\'s give them a big thank you.

With that, we\'ll take a very brief break and then come back to wrap up
this segment.

(Whereupon, the foregoing matter went off the record at 11:56 a.m. and
resumed at 12:12 p.m.)

MR. LONG: First of all, before or as we get started on this segment,
when we are done with this segment in about 15 minutes or so, if you
would please take your materials with you today. That\'s a little
different than what we\'ve done in the past.

The reason for that is for the fact that we\'re heading to Fred\'s home
and then tomorrow morning with the movement of the meeting into the
other room. So if you would please remember to take anything that you
wish to have tomorrow with you today.

And Catherine, if you would please explain, just before we break for
lunch, how is this going to work for a visit to Fred\'s?

MS. DAVIS: Sure. We\'ll break for lunch, and there is shuttle
transportation provided for the preparatory research portion of today,
and the shuttle will be leaving when we finish lunch around 1:15, and
it\'ll bring us back to the Department, and we should arrive back at the
Department around 5:00, so.

MR. LONG: Okay, and if you would \-- thank you, Catherine.

MS. DAVIS: And then Fred can explain over lunch what we\'ll be doing.

MR. LONG: Okay. Thank you. If we could \-- I want you to be thinking
about this, because tomorrow morning, as you note in our agenda, we
start at 8:30, again a reminder, because that\'s different from today.

We\'ll start at 8:30. Then we have about 35 minutes for public comment.
Last time \-- I\'m just going back historically \-- last time we had
zero or one, so if that happens we\'ll just collapse the agenda and move
it backwards.

Then at 9:15, as you see, the FERPA presentation, but the reason I\'m
bringing that up is the fact that I\'d like to spend a few minutes
tomorrow morning, so that you have time to think about it, what we would
put into a recommendation regarding data.

So be thinking about that, not \-- that\'s rhetorical for right now, but
we spend a few minutes tomorrow morning, what we would bring forward as
a recommendation in the report to the Secretary.

We do have a few minutes, so if any of you have any comments on the
things that went on this morning \-- when I say things, I mean from the
presentation on building on results or the panel or anything else for
the good of the order as we break for lunch. Anyone? Hope?

MS. TAFT: Just a comment on data in general, and as Shep says, I\'m
always talking about the community and schools and how they need to work
together. I would hope that the Department of Education as they develop
their uniform data set would cooperate with CSP and SAMHSA and ONDCP and
OJJDP so that there is one agreed upon set of data that needs to be
gathered, either by a school or community to satisfy all the
requirements here at the federal level so that there\'s not a multitude
of different kinds of surveys that need to be done at the local level.

MR. LONG: Could I ask as a follow \-- and I think we would all agree
with that. I would like to ask a follow-up question. How many of you
representing the various states that we have sitting around this table,
how many of you have that consolidated comprehensive data system that
was just \--

I think therein is \-- I hear what you\'re saying. Therein is our
problem. We can\'t do it on a state level, and let alone a national but
again, it begs for the conversation.

MR. JONES: Me? Oh, yes. I was just going to follow up, and I\'ll make
this recommendation tomorrow, though, but if there was a framework, or
if we knew what the framework was that\'s being used in terms of the
kind of data sets that are being collected, the method at which the data
sets are being collected, and then the linkage between those data
collections and intervention policy, that would be great, you know, but
I don\'t even know if that framework exists, or I don\'t know the extent
to which that\'s been discussed and revisited based on, you know, new
data, new events, et cetera, you know, but just a framework and a live
framework that we\'re operating from.

MR. LONG: Shep?

MR. KELLAM: Yes, I just \-- well, I certainly agree with both Hope and
Russell. Leaving aside the politics of it, because I think in some sense
that gets wrapped up in the whole idea of the partnerships, there\'s the
politics becomes mutual self-interest, and that you work through in the
forming of partnerships.

But the idea of an integrated data system, one that is anchored around
kids learning and all the related things that go into kids learning and
developing academic and psychological and physical well being is a huge,
powerful idea.

It\'s what Secretary Spellings asked about when she was here visiting
us, and it seems to me that the relationship in that partnership to the
people in the school building and in the institutions, Child Welfare and
Public Health, that brings together a framework around the mission of
the institutions involved, and integrating that with researchers then
becomes, in fact, a new basis for science itself, and we\'re on the
verge of doing that.

We\'ve tried that with Safe and Drug-Free Schools a little bit, but the
Safe Schools Healthy Student program was an early effort to try to make
that happen, and I think we\'ve got to somehow build on that.

I think that Hope and Russell are absolutely right, that our job is
creating a framework, a simple framework that brings the data together,
different kind of data with policymaking, with the people that \--
parent, kids that run institutions so that it\'s one enterprise.

MR. LONG: Thank you very much. Any other comments about anything that
happened this morning or any new events?

MS. DUDE: I don\'t know if this is going to make sense. I\'ve got a
bunch of notes here, because I have so many things bouncing around in my
head right now, but speaking as a prevention person who is there on the
front lines \-- now, granted, I\'m with college, but I work closely with
our local high schools and the prevention people there.

It just seems to me we\'re setting them up for failure. First, they wear
many, many hats. The person who does prevention is typically like a high
school counselor or a junior high counselor who\'s got a million other
things to do, and then we\'re giving them very little money.

We\'re expecting them to change behavior in a child that since birth had
been inundated by all these other things in their life, the messages
they hear, the parents, the things happening in their neighborhoods and
all of that, and it\'s the \-- I\'m a believer in that concept of it
takes a village to raise a child and that the school system is one
member of that village, a very, very important member of that village.

But we have this great data that shows that \-- kind of profiles, gives
us a snapshot of what things are like at that particular moment, and
that helps guide our prevention efforts, but as has been said, it
doesn\'t really evaluate our prevention efforts, and yet money seems to
be tied \-- unless I\'m misunderstanding, money seems to be tied to our
ability to evaluate our prevention efforts.

And with that comes the several assumptions. One assumption is that a
prevention intervention is going to change behavior, and I\'m of the
belief that many prevention efforts change behavior, not one, and that
we in the prevention field need to create as many a-ha moments as we can
throughout that child\'s life from K all the way through higher
education.

We try to create a-ha moments, and it\'s the accumulation of those a-ha
moments that ultimately might create behavior change. It kind of inches
a student down those stages of change. It kind of inches them down, and
yet to evaluate a prevention effort implies that that one thing made
that change happen, and I think that\'s setting ourselves up to make a
very difficult - you know, it\'s almost impossible.

And what Tommy said also, and I completely understand what you\'re
saying, but that creates an additional frustration for the prevention
person in that one great place to have prevention efforts occurs in the
classroom, and yet I know in our Columbia public schools it\'s virtually
impossible to get in the classroom to try to do a prevention effort
because of just what Tommy was saying.

There are all these other things, very, very important things that need
to happen. So what\'s happening is this prevention person has to find
something they can do after school, in between classes, or during lunch
or whatever, and so we\'re just \-- it just seems to me that we\'re
setting prevention folks up for failure, especially if the same time
we\'re doing that we\'re decreasing their funding and increasing the
expectation that they know how to evaluate their programs, which most of
them don\'t.

For one thing, it\'s almost impossible to evaluate, but also you\'re
expecting these people to know how to do that kind of research, and they
just don\'t. And some of the things we\'ve said in passing \-- I mean,
these are things like, \"Well, they can partner with local colleges.\"

Well, first, a significant number don\'t have a local college next to
them, or secondly, my experience with the \-- we have tremendous
researchers on our campus, but they\'re so busy doing their own
research, they don\'t want to take the time to necessarily help a local
school. And so, again, nice idea in theory, but not necessarily the most
practical approach that would happen.

And so I think the thing I\'m most concerned about is the cycle that
we\'re creating of we give them a little bit of money. They can\'t show
results, so we decrease the money, and yet we need the money to be able
to do the best programs and to be able to evaluate, so it\'s just that
vicious circle or cycle that I\'m just really concerned about.

I love the data, and I use this kind of data all the time, because we
have similar data on the college level. I use it all the time to inform
my practices, and when you can show trend data going down, it\'s nice to
think that it\'s your practices that help make that number go down, but
the fact that we can\'t prove it then, again, creates that cycle of
frustration.

And so I just \-- I don\'t know what my point is. My point is I don\'t
want funding to go down because they can\'t prove their effectiveness,
because I think it\'s very difficult to prove their effectiveness. Maybe
the researchers can prove the effectiveness, come up with these best
practices, but to expect the local schools to prove their effectiveness
I think is very, very difficult.

There may be some school systems that can do it very well, but I have a
wonderful school district. Columbia public schools are great, and yet
they have a very hard time doing the very things we\'re talking about
doing in here, so I just want to put in my two cents for that.

MR. LONG: Thank you, Kim. Anything else for the good of the order before
we break?

MS. TAFT: One tie-on to what Kim said. I have found in Ohio that with
the threat of reduced funding at the federal level, many of the
drug-free school coordinators at the local level find other occupations,
and therefore when little money does come through, then they have to
start all over again, hiring someone new, getting that person educated
and trained on what a drug-free school coordinator is going to do, so
it\'s very detrimental, the ups and downs of the funding cycles.

MR. LONG: Anybody else?

MR. HERMANN: I agree with everything that has been said. In my mind, the
message that comes through is, to a certain extent, what we\'re dealing
with is perceptions and sort of misunderstandings about programs and
whatnot.

So I think it really behooves the Committee to look at every opportunity
to improve the strength of the program, the structure, you know,
opportunities that we might have to make recommendations in a number of
different areas. So while it\'s frustrating, I also think it\'s an
opportunity to try and move forward, and I want to make sure that don\'t
lose complete sight of that.

MR. LONG: Thank you, Mike. I saw your red light click on there.

MR. MODZELESKI: I don\'t know, Dave, whether this is going to be the
time. I just want to bring up, and we may want to discuss it at another
meeting, but sort of hold your calendar.

We\'re in the process of sending out hold-the-date messages to the state
education agencies about our national conference, which is going to be
held here in Washington, D.C. August 2, 3, and 4, so I will be more than
happy to provide a briefing at our next meeting, but I think if you
could just put a hold-the-date for August 2, 3, and 4 here in
Washington, D.C. will be our conference.

And that is \-- actually, it\'s interesting. The theme of the conference
\-- I don\'t have the title exactly right, \"Looking Back and Moving
Forward.\" It\'s the twentieth anniversary of the \-- which began as the
Drug-Free Schools and Communities Act and has morphed into Safe and
Drug-Free Schools and Communities Act, so 20 years of experience.

We\'ll be looking at where we\'ve been, where we are, and where we need
to go, so many of the things that Kim talked about and Hope talked about
and Mike talked about, I mean, looking at some of these issues will be
part of that conference in August.

MR. LONG: This, I think, Kim, could be an a-ha. Let\'s talk sometime
about some \-- we\'re breaking for lunch, so this makes it easier \--
some type of involvement, looking back, where we are, going forward,
some of the things we\'ve done here as a Committee, just maybe we could
have a discussion in the future about a potential degree of involvement
with this Committee. A-ha.

Anything else that \-- okay. If not, then it is 12:30, and we will break
for lunch. Thank you.

(Whereupon, the foregoing matter adjourned at 12:28 p.m.)