Appendix B

APPENDIX B
Letter to Accompany School Data Form

Jerry West, Ph.D.
Survey Director

Date

Superintendent First & Last Name
Superintendent
District Name
Street Address
City, State Zip
Dear
We are pleased that you are interested in having your district participate in The National
Title I Study of Implementation and Outcomes: Early Childhood Language Development
(ECLD), sponsored by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) in the U.S. Department of
Education. As we discussed during the phone call on [DATE], the study will be limited to Title I
schools that have a prekindergarten, kindergarten, and first through third grades and that meet
certain reading proficiency criteria. In this preliminary stage, we are collecting information on
schools that meet these criteria. We need this information in order to select the 10 schools from
your district that will be invited to participate in the study.
Using information from the 2008-2009 school year, we have conducted a preliminary
assessment of schools in your district that meet the study criteria and listed them in the attached
table. To be eligible for the study and before we can select our school sample, we will need to
confirm that each of the schools will still be in operation in 2010-11, is currently Title I eligible,
and has children enrolled in all of the grades of interest. We will also need to collect information
on the number of students in each grade (prekindergarten through third) for the 2009-2010
school year, and any recent or anticipated substantial changes at the school. Last, if possible, we
would like to collect information on the percent of third graders who were determined to be
reading proficient according to the state assessments and the percentage of all students who are
eligible for free- or reduced price lunch, or are classified as English language learners (ELL).
We will be following up with a phone call in the next few days to discuss the best way to
collect and transmit the information. We appreciate your assistance in this effort, which will
improve the sampling and data collection process, and look forward to speaking with you.

Sincerely,

Jerry West, Ph.D.
Survey Director

B.3