Tracey Silver stands before 23 second graders at Carolyn Brevard Elementary School in Tallahassee sounding out words with them.

“Shhhh.”

“Eaaaa.”

“Mmmmm.”

“Poooo.”

“What's the word,” Silver asks.

“Shampoo,” the children call in unison.

Silver, a senior in elementary education at Florida State University, is getting hands-on experience with some of the most challenging situations she may encounter as a professional by working with some of Tallahassee's most disadvantaged students.

Just around the corner from Silver's classroom, mentors made up of FSU staff and students have just completed an hour of one-on-one sessions with first graders. These are some of the most likely children to fall behind others at their grade level because they come from low income households.

Carrie Whitehill, a senior majoring in psychology, began a session by helping her young partner with word sounds. Within a few minutes they advanced to stringing words together in sentences. On the table next to the boy sits Al, a green and yellow alligator puppet that Whitehill sometimes uses to illustrate the mouth movements necessary to produce certain sounds.

“Very nice,” Whitehill tells the boy. “I like the way you are reading the sentences.”

These may seem like the typical tools used by teachers and interns in elementary education, but they're not. The programs Whitehill and Silver use are available throughout the nation, but theirs were tailored by FSU researchers to help the most disadvantaged students overcome reading disabilities, said Joseph Torgesen, a professor of psychology at FSU.

These two programs are a small part of a unique partnership between FSU and the Leon County School System to bring cutting-edge university research into the classroom to help disadvantaged students in all subjects.

Studies show that as many as 37 percent of children in kindergarten through third grade have insufficient reading skills, said Torgesen. These are students in danger of lagging behind others at their level and, unless their reading proficiency can be improved, eventually dropping out of school. But with FSU mentors guiding the bottom 20 percent of first grade readers in several Leon County schools through the phonics-based program Torgesen helped refine, the failure rate of those students has dropped to about two percent.

“It's clear that if kids don't learn to read in kindergarten through third grade it drastically affects their lives,” Torgesen said. “It's also more difficult to catch kids up if they don't become affluent readers early.”

Scenes such as those at Brevard Elementary are being played out daily at a dozen other schools in south Leon County whose students come mostly from low income neighborhoods. Besides improving the youngest students' literacy skills, fifth graders are using computers to go online and complete math and science assignments developed by FSU faculty. This has increased not only the number of students who complete their assignments but also those who successfully finish algebra one and other courses, said Larry Dennis, a physics professor who helped design the project. Fourth graders are also composing writing assignments on computers, which are then e-mailed to mentors at the university for evaluation.

This “Southside Professional Development School Network” (SPDSN), is one of the latest facets of a growing FSU initiative to improve the academic performance of public school students throughout the state. Under the umbrella of FSU's “K-12 Initiative,” low income and disadvantaged students across the state are succeeding in school.

From the United States Capitol to state capitals to the halls of local school board buildings, everybody today, it seems, is talking about making public education “seamless.” That is, to make sure students have everything they need to move smoothly from one grade to the next, and one school to the next until graduation, without having to catch up on things they should have already mastered.

That's exactly what FSU focused on many years before “seamless” became the buzzword among educational professionals and government leaders. The K-12 initiative makes available almost 100 programs to public schools from Miami-Dade to Pensacola to improve students' academic performance. And some of the programs are more than 20 years old.

Since the state began tracking the overall performance of each public school in 1996, Lt. Gov. Frank Brogan believes most universities are now forging partnerships with local school systems to improve learning. But FSU, Brogan said, was one of the few universities building these relationships long before 1996.

“Here were some of the finest post-secondary institutions in the world but they did nothing to give back to the K-12 institutions from which they drew their students,” said Brogan, the former state education commissioner and school superintendent in Martin County. “There are, though, some good examples that I can draw from and FSU is one of them.”

FSU President Talbot “Sandy” D'Alemberte said one only needs to look at the breadth of programs the university offers to public schools to understand this commitment.

“We have been an engaged university for many years,” said D'Alemberte. “Our recent commitment to the Southside Schools Initiative is only the latest of a long series of programs which connect us with the public schools.”

Proof that Leon County's disadvantaged schools are benefiting from their partnership with FSU is mounting fast. Consider that:

• Five of the nine elementary and middle schools that launched the initiative with FSU improved their overall student performance on state assessment tests from a grade of “D” to “C.”
• Two of the original nine schools in the partnership improved their overall performance from a “C” to an “A.”
• First graders who were matched up with FSU mentors showed significant improvement in letter sound and reading skills last year compared to schools with no mentors.

Leon County School Superintendent Bill Montford said there are many reasons why his schools now rank in the top five among Florida's 67 school districts in all subject areas. But there is no question that FSU has helped schools in low-income areas improve significantly.

“When other superintendents contact me and ask what's working here, I say there's a multitude of factors … but it's hard to ignore the benefits we've received from FSU.”

The K-12 initiative is so broad that it reaches into all of FSU's 17 colleges or schools. In August, the Southside project, the mentor project, and other components of the initiative were brought under FSU's Learning Systems Institute (LSI), an internationally recognized program that helped countries in Asia, Africa and South America build their entire public education systems.

After assisting the former Republic of Korea, Indonesia, Nepal, Peru and other countries with their schools, LSI director emeritus Robert Morgan said he welcomes an initiative to help Florida's public schools.“Because of LSI's three decades of experience in working toward the improvement of education on an international basis, we have learned a lot about how to get the greatest return on our educational systems,” Morgan said.

The K-12 Initiative is built on a simple but heretofore rarely used three-cornered foundation to improve student performance. This triangle begins with the latest university research, including everything from new forms of classroom instruction to child brain development. Then, innovative programs are developed for the classroom. The triangle is completed with assessments to measure how well students' improved.

The past failures of universities and public schools to come together under this approach is what Laura Hassler, acting director at LSI and FSU's lead person on K-12 initiatives, calls “the big disconnect.”

“I think students have been shortchanged by these disconnects,” said Hassler, who spent nearly 25 years as a public school teacher, administrator and principal before joining FSU two years ago. “There are a lot of partnerships between universities and public schools around the state, but I'm not aware of any that are able to make the connection between these three areas as powerfully as we can.”

There are many reasons why public schools and university researchers failed to connect in the past, Torgesen said. Researchers often target their work to professional journals and academia, not public schools.

Teachers, on the other hand, feared losing authority over their classroom if the researchers were brought into the fold.

Beverly Owens, principal at Nims Middle School in Tallahassee, a member of the Southside partnership, said some of her teachers were leery of the relationship with FSU at first, but not anymore.

“Our classroom doors aren't shut anymore because of this relationship. They're part of our school now,” Owens said of FSU faculty and staff. “They're not just visitors here anymore.”

Nims was a “critically low performing” school when it was first assessed by the state in 1996. Under the FSU partnership it improved to a “C” school even as the state's criteria to grade public schools got tougher.

The Southside project and mentor initiative are just two of the newer components of FSU's K-12 Initiative. The university is involved with dozens of other innovative programs that have helped public school students achieve higher goals for years. Here are just a few examples:

• Students in 12 Panhandle counties are learning about money management and the economy under a program run by FSU's Stavros Center for Economic Education.
• A program begun in 1993 is helping to increase the number of minority students in Leon County entering post-graduate studies in science and health related fields.
• FSU's premier museums make themselves available to public schools for various programs in the arts and humanities. These include the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, the Appleton Museum in Ocala, and the FSU Museum of Fine Art in Tallahassee.
• The College of Education and the Miami-Dade Public School System have teamed up to train math and science teachers in urban school districts with diverse populations. The program graduated its first 167 teachers in 1998.
• More than 30 FSU-sponsored programs are currently underway in Gadsden County helping one of the state's poorest school districts on several fronts. FSU law students are assisting migrant farm workers who are cut off from receiving food stamps, nursing students are helping in the local health department, and a variety of tutoring services are being offered to students in several schools.

But while Leon County and other school districts measure the successes of connecting with FSU on a grand scale, the mentors who spend dozens of hours with disadvantaged children measure their success in smaller, more personal, doses.

For Aimee Wallace, the breakthrough came on Halloween. The Brevard Elementary fifth grader she's helped for more than 18 months to improve his reading and writing skills showed her his report card. He got a “C” in math, but “A's” and “B's” in everything else.

Just last spring, Wallace remembers becoming frustrated because the boy didn't seem to be making as much progress as she had hoped. She thought about asking for another child to mentor but felt that would be like abandoning the child. So, she asked for another year with him.

“I was just so impressed that he had done so well,” Wallace recalled after seeing his October report card. “Just a year before he'd come home with all below average grades. When I saw that report card I knew this was the kid for me.”

Kingsley Kerce mentors another fifth grader at Brevard in math. When he realized the child was having trouble staying focused on one topic for very long, Kerce made learning a game. He brought in a small basketball hoop, and when the boy answered a problem correctly, he got to shoot a basket. Each time he made a basket he had to back up a little to make the next shot more challenging.

“He equated getting an answer right to basketball,” Kerce said, “but it was also challenging him to do better in math.”

The basketball hoop gave way to other games that incorporated dice, a heart rate monitor and other things into learning games. Sometimes, when they finished, the boy would turn to Kerce and say: “That was fun.”

“It was the first time he was engaged in something, and at the same time, he was learning something,” Kerce said.