Welcome
Welcome to the Web site of Check & Connect—a model to promote students' engagement with school, reduce dropout, and increase school completion. The Check & Connect model originated from a partnership of researchers, practitioners, parents, and students led by the Institute on Community Integration, University of Minnesota.
This Web site offers information regarding the Check & Connect model, current projects and initiatives, related publications, upcoming presentations and workshops, and staff. We hope this information is useful to educators, researchers, administrators, and others interested in helping youth remain engaged in school and on track to graduate.
Please see new information on a 2-day training offered at the University of Minnesota - Minneapolis in April 2008.
What is Check & Connect?
Check & Connect is a model of sustained intervention for promoting students' engagement with school and learning. Demonstrated outcomes include:
- decrease in truancy,
- decrease in dropout rates,
- increase in accrual of credits,
- increase in school completion, and
- impact on literacy.
Check & Connect is data-driven and grounded in research on resiliency and home-school collaboration. Student referral criteria include alterable warning signs of school withdrawal – primarily attendance indices (absences, tardies, or skipping class)—in the context of academic performance and emotional or behavioral problems.
Check & Connect is implemented by a person referred to as a monitor or mentor. The person is a cross between a mentor, an advocate, and a service coordinator whose primary goal is to keep education a salient issue for disengaged students and their teachers and family members. The monitor/mentor works with a caseload of students and families over time (at least two years) and follows their caseload from program to program and school to school.
Check & Connect is structured to maximize personal contact and opportunities to build trusting relationships. Student levels of engagement (such as attendance, grades, suspensions) are "checked" regularly and used to guide the monitors' efforts to increase and maintain students' "connection" with school.
Original Research Team
Sandra L. Christenson, Professor, Educational Psychology (School Psychology Program)
David Evelo, School-based Project Coordinator, Minneapolis Public Schools
Mary Sinclair, Research Associate, Institute on Community Integration
Martha Thurlow, Director, National Center on Educational Outcomes, University of Minnesota
Check & Connect is located at the Institute on Community Integration, Minnesota's University Center for Excellence in Developmental Disabilities (UCEDD) in the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota. Check & Connect has been funded in part by the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs and Dakota County Community Services, Minnesota.
This Web site is approved by Bobby v5.0 as being inclusive to users by following the WAI Guidelines for Accessibility. Suggestions, questions, or comments may be directed to checkandconnect@umn.edu.
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