KSOE to receive $1.4 million grant to expand nationally recognized CW-FIT program to local school districts.

The Kalmanovitz School of Education has been awarded $1.4 million to partner with Mount Diablo Unified School District and Vallejo Unified School District to expand the Class-Wide Function-related Intervention Teams, or CW-FIT, program. The grant was part of a larger grant given to both KSOE and the University of Kansas.

This training will help teachers at six elementary schools in both districts to improve classroom management by teaching them to reinforce positive behaviors in students, and includes lessons on appropriate ways for students to get a teacher’s attention, follow directions, and ignore minor disruptive behavior from fellow students.

The CW-FIT program and methods were highlighted recently in an article in Forbes Magazine.

“Student success starts in classroom environments that minimize disruption and maximize on dedicated instruction time, so developing our teachers with evidence-based tools and methodology to continually foster those catalytic dynamics is paramount,” said Dr. Robert Martinez, former Superintendent of Mt. Diablo Unified School District. “We are grateful to our partners at Saint Mary's College as we anticipate that the CW-FIT program will be enriching for our teachers and lead to measurably positive student outcomes.”

KSOE professor Peter Alter will lead the CW-FIT training center in the districts.

“We’re excited to train district personnel to implement the CW-FIT Program,” said Dr. Alter. “It has the potential to positively impact teachers and students in area schools as well as to strengthen our partnerships in local districts.”

The overall goal is to build capacity for the classroom management program and determine ways to scale it up nationally.

“We want to foster broad adoption of CW-FIT. Our plan with this grant is to develop a district coach program that can work as a model for school districts to cost-efficiently implement a proven intervention,” said Howard Wills, associate research professor at the Juniper Gardens Children's Project at KU, and the principal investigator on the grant.

Led by KU researchers, the CW-FIT grant is a part of a larger United States Department of Education initiative known as the Education Innovation and Research-Mid-Phase (EIR) program, which is designed to generate and validate solutions to persistent education challenges and expand those solutions to serve more students.