Roberts & Kay, Inc. -- The Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence

The Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence

1984 – present

The Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence is the premier advocacy organization for education in Kentucky, and it stands as a national model for effective citizen engagement in school improvement at every level, from pre-school through graduate school. The Prichard Committee began in 1980 as a group of 30 citizens commissioned by the state's Council on Higher Education to envision the future of higher education in Kentucky. In 1983 the Committee reorganized and became an independent organization dedicated to advocating for improved education for all Kentuckians.

RKI began working with the Prichard Committee in 1984; since then, there have been very few periods when we were not involved with some type of project for the Committee. We have done five main kinds of work:

Assisting with designing and carrying out large public processes
Conducting research on the public response to school improvement
Designing a dialogue process to serve as a first stage for parents and teachers to work together on school improvement
Working on internal staff development
Providing website design and maintenance

Assisting with designing and carrying out large public processes

In our first project for the Prichard Committee, we assisted with a design for a town forum in Kentucky on the importance of education. We worked with Committee staff for months to plan the forum, which took place on November 15, 1984 at 150 simultaneous meetings statewide. Kentucky Educational Television conducted a live broadcast to launch the town meetings. More than 20,000 Kentuckians participated. The main question for participants in the town forums was "What do you want your schools to do?" RKI trained facilitators and reporters around the state to conduct the sessions and helped with analysis of the results after the sessions were completed. The number of participants surprised many in Kentucky and set the stage for the first round of legislative improvements in Kentucky schools in the 1985 special legislative session that Governor Martha Layne Collins called to deal with education.

From the mid-80s through the early 90s RKI worked with Prichard Committee staff on building skills for planning and implementing new projects, including the creation of the Community Committees for Education in Kentucky School Districts.

Be sure to visit descriptions of other large group processes we've developed.

In 1999, Rona worked with several Prichard Committee staff members to design the annual conference for the Commonwealth Institute for Parent Leadership (CIPL). The staff decided to hold the two-day conference using an "open space" format. The theme was "Now What? How Can Parent Power Improve Kentucky Schools in the New Millennium?" Rona and Donna Wainscott, RKI office manager, assisted with the planning process for the conference and were on hand during the conference to make sure everything went smoothly. Rona also served as the facilitator for the open space event.

Check out descriptions of other open space events we've conducted.

Conducting research on public response to school improvement

We conducted high quality, systematically designed focus group research projects annually from 1991 to 1994 for the Prichard Committee and the Partnership for Kentucky Schools (formerly the Partnership for Kentucky School Reform). These focus groups aimed to learn how Kentucky citizens were responding to the nation's most progressive education reform effort – the Kentucky Education Reform Act (KERA), passed into law in 1990 – and to discover effective ways for citizens to be active participants in reform. These extensive studies provided guidance for Prichard Committee strategic decision making during the critical early years of stabilizing Kentucky's new school law and discovering how it needed to be improved.

The topics and key questions for each research project are presented here:

1991 Topic: Views on public schools and on recent education reform efforts in the state

Questions focused on these themes:

Participation in civic, religious, and other volunteer organizations
Sources of information about local schools, schools statewide, the Kentucky Education Reform Act and its implementation
Impressions of what local schools do most well and least well
Responses to a series of statements about Kentucky education
Familiarity with and opinions about aspects of the Kentucky Education Reform Act

1992 Topic: Views on public schools and on the recent education reform efforts, in order to understand how best to convey information about the reform and how to increase Kentuckians' understanding of reform and support for it

Questions focused on these themes:

Participants' impressions of what their local schools do most well and least well
Participants' sources of information about local schools and about the Kentucky Education Reform Act and its implementation
Participants' familiarity with and opinions about aspects of the Kentucky Education Reform Act
Participants' assessment of the relative importance of several issues, including education
Participants' responses to a series of statements about Kentucky education

1993 Topic: Can all children learn at high levels?

Questions focused on these themes:

Impressions of what local schools do most well and least well
Personal experiences in the earliest years of school, the middle grades, and high school
Responses to the proposition that all children can learn at high levels, descriptions of those children who cannot learn at high levels, and perceptions of difference between children who can and cannot learn at high levels
Aspects participants would include if they were designing the ideal public school for their communities
Ways to persuade other Kentuckians to support the proposition that all children can learn at high levels
For students, examples of memorable best and worst learning experiences
For educators, sources of information about local schools and about the Kentucky Education Reform Act and its implementation

1994 Topic: Parents' involvement in their children's education

Questions focused on these themes:

Parents' hopes for their children, and the concerns they have about their children's future
Ways in which parents interact with their children in general, and in relation to learning
What rules parents have about school and homework, and how they discipline their children
The nature of parent involvement in public schools
Identification of circumstances and behaviors that encourage and discourage optimal parent involvement in children's learning, especially at school
Parents' suggestions for increasing parent involvement in children's academic learning

Designing a dialogue process to serve as a first stage for parents and teachers to work together on school improvement

We worked with Prichard Committee staff, particularly Bev Raimondo, who is the director of the Commonwealth Institute for Parent Leadership, to design a structured dialogue called "Parents and Teachers Talking Together," or "PT3" as most people call it. This dialogue continues to be used widely throughout Kentucky. More than 8,000 people had participated by Fall, 2000. All participants in the Commonwealth Institute for Parent Leadership learned to use PT3 to set the stage for improving parent/teacher communication and parent/teacher relationships, as well as parent involvement in schools.

Visit other descriptions of dialogue processes we've designed.

Working on internal staff development

Steve in action at an outdoor challenge workshop in 1999 In 1995 and again in the fall of 1998, Steve and Rona worked with all Prichard Committee staff members on improving internal communication and work group effectiveness. This work was driven by the expanding project commitments and the expanding size of the Prichard Committee staff. The 1998 work focused specifically on identifying individual work preferences and building on those preferences to improve work processes. In the spring of 1999, Prichard Committee staff participated in an outdoor challenge team building workshop. This workshop was designed to build the skills most relevant to the work life of the group. After a terrific day on the beautiful course at Asbury College (Wilmore, KY) (see photo of Steve at right), Steve and Rona worked indoors with staff on applying the lessons learned outdoors. The several hours of video footage shot outdoors as two separate groups moved through the intriguing initiatives helped enliven and inform the application session on the second day. Check out the agenda of the application session.

In the fall of 2000, Rona and Steve began working with the Prichard Committee staff to plan an indoor version of the outdoor challenge session that staff had enjoyed in 1999. Driven by a desire to hold a session in the winter months, as well as by some specific staff health concerns, RKI used the inventive indoor team challenge equipment developed and built by Mobile Team Challenge.

Learn more about our outdoor and indoor team challenge workshops.

Collaborative efforts

Beginning in 2001, the Prichard Committee was charged by the Governor to work jointly with the Council on Post-secondary Education to develop an Institute for Effective Governance, which would provide opportunities for ongoing education, training, and technical support for the boards of the state's universities and KCTCS. Steve is working with an initial planning group to develop the institute.

Learn more about our outdoor and indoor team challenge workshops.

Providing website design and maintenance

RKI Web Designer Liz Jones designed and launched the Prichard Committee's web site, www.prichardcommittee.org, in early 2000. The site includes an online library and useful education-related links and news items. RKI continues to maintain the site, which has grown exponentially since its launch.

After the success of www.prichardcommittee.org, the Prichard Committee asked us to create a new site for the Commonwealth Institute. They wanted the new site to have its own identity while still maintaining strong ties to the main Prichard Committee site. We designed this new site, www.cipl.org, and launched it in early 2001.

Learn more about RKI's web design work.

Be sure to visit other descriptions of our work in the areas of school improvement and community change and citizen engagement.