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Investigating Program Staying Power
A PowerPoint Presentation based on an informal report presented to
The Sustainable Schools Project
By Andrew Powers, Amy L. Powers, and PEER Associates, Inc.
May 26, 2007
The Sustainable Schools Project (SSP) has achieved many laudable successes and faced a variety of challenges during its first few years of operation at the Champlain and Barnes schools in Burlington. Ongoing evaluation has informed program planning and implementation, documented outcomes for students, teachers, and schools, explored barriers, and offered recommendations. The 2004-05 evaluation report for Champlain School specifically focused on SSP’s sustainability, or staying power, at the school, and demonstrated that the program was persisting in various ways after the active intervention was complete.
Armed with the experience of working intensively in two very different sites, and informed by years of evaluation data, SSP now aims to refine its program and expand its reach. At this point, rather than take a retrospective look at program staying power, program staff are using evaluation as a tool to look forward, asking, “How can we design and implement our programs with an eye on the future right from the start?” While it is important to evaluate program outcomes on a regular basis, it is even more important to understand how ongoing positive outcomes can be assured after the bulk of the intervention and investment at a school have been completed.
The presentation (downloadable below) highlights the findings from a broad (but not exhaustive) literature search and a sequence of interviews with local stakeholders in the Sustainable Schools Project.
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