CSC is designed to help elementary schools become caring learning communities that effectively support students' academic, social, and ethical development. Its goal is to help students develop the academic and practical skills needed to function productively in society, and the ethical and social skills needed to function humanely and wisely.

The original program, which was extensively evaluated in a six-district, four state study, has recently been revised to strengthen it academically and make it easier, less costly, and more flexible to implement. Its three complementary components are as follows:

• Caring School Community: Four approaches for building students' "sense of community" and fostering parent involvement: (a) class meetings that build supportive relationships and shared goals within the classroom, (b) a cross-age "buddies" program, (c) school-wide community-building and service activities, and (d) home-based parent-involvement activities that help students connect their experiences at home with their experiences at school.

• Making Meaning: Strategies That Build Comprehension and Community: A reading comprehension program that provides a structured, week-by-week curriculum at each grade level, K-6, for teaching nine comprehension strategies (e.g., questioning, making inferences, summarizing) that are central for students to understand what they are reading and that can be applied to a wide range of narrative and expository texts. The program uses direct teaching strategies that integrate academic and social development. Read-alouds of quality, multicultural literature and expository text, teacher-facilitated discussions, explicit teaching of strategies, and guided and independent practice in the use of the strategies form the core of instruction.

• SIPPS (Systematic Instruction in Phoneme Awareness, Phonics, and Sight Words): The SIPPS decoding program has three levels of instruction designed for flexible groupings of students in grades K-3, and is also used as an intervention program with older students. The program helps students develop the word-recognition skills that enable them to become fluent readers.

Source: Developmental Studies Center, Oakland, CA. Available on-line at: http://www.devstu.org/.