State and Federal Grants

Hatching Results consults with school districts to close funding, training and evaluation gaps. Trish Hatch, President & CEO of Hatching Results, has more than 15 years of experience writing grants. Her writing team has an 80% award success rate bringing more than $16 million to fund school counseling programs.

Our expert grant writing and evaluation services have supported districts throughout the country, including the Elementary and Secondary School Counseling (ESSC) Programs grant. Ten percent of all awarded ESSC grants (6 out of the 60 awarded) in 2012 were co-authored by Hatching Results resulting in over $7 million for school counseling programs. Our award-winning grant designs are featured in the text: The Use of Data In School Counseling: Hatching Results for Students, Programs, and the Profession (Hatch, 2014).

Grant Implementation and Evaluation

Hatching Results provides comprehensive program implementation and evaluation of school counseling program grants, including  the Elementary and Secondary School Counseling Grant (ESSC) and the Comprehensive Counseling Initiative for Indiana K-12 Students. Our work with schools and districts supports grant requirements, with a specific focus on promoting sustainability of the school counseling program when grant funding ends. With years of experience drawn from the work of Carol Weiss (1998), our program evaluation model seeks to improve programs and services for all students.

Program Evaluation and Research

Since the 1960s, Carol Weiss, professor at Harvard University, has served as a pivotal researcher and theorist on evaluation and its role in federal policy. Weiss defines evaluation as "the systematic assessment of the operation and/or the outcomes of a program or a policy, as compared to a set of explicit or implicit standards, as a means of contributing to the improvement of the program or policy" (1998, p. 4). Stated more simply, evaluation is the review of results or of one particular program or policy designed to improve the lot of people.

What is the difference between research and evaluation? Program evaluation largely originated in 1965 with the passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) and the need to account for the expenditure of funds for programs (Mathison, 2004). Educational psychologists and researchers found it difficult to utilize traditional hypothesis testing in school settings, which led to evaluation becoming a separate discipline. Some argue that research and evaluation are connected, because doing an evaluation requires doing research. Both evaluation and research describe, look for relationships, and trace sequences from one variable to another. Others draw the distinctions that research is highly detailed and strives for purity, while evaluation is applicable to the overall program and is more generalizable.

While there are many similarities, one central difference is that researchers formulate their own hypotheses and seek to test them; evaluators derive their questions from concerns of policy or problem communities. Research is intended for knowledge; program evaluation is intended for use. Simplistically stated, researchers prove; evaluators improve (Mathison, 2004).

Weiss describes five elements of evaluation:

• Systemic assessment (quantitative/qualitative)

• Process (the ways program was conducted)

• Outcomes (the effect)

• Standards for comparison (the set of expectations), and

• Improvement (increase program, improve resource allocation).

[Excerpt from: Hatch, T. (2014). The use of data in school counseling: Hatching Results for students, programs, and the profession. Corwin Press, Thousand Oaks, CA.]

Responsibilities of the Program Evaluator

At Hatching Results, we believe a good evaluator is part evaluator, part researcher, and part program specialist. Our evaluators:

• Develop a logic model explanation of how the activities and components of the programs relate to each other and to the goals and objectives

• Develop measures to determine whether your program is meeting its goals and objectives

• Develop an evaluation design to determine whether your program is having its intended impact

• Assist in design of data collection forms and procedures to capture and record the qualitative and quantitative data that will be collected

• Analyze data and present an outcome evaluation with results and conclusions from the findings

• Provide recommendations to the program regarding ways to improve service delivery

Responsibilities of the Program Evaluator for the Federal Elementary and Secondary School Counseling Grant:

Our role is to ensure districts meet the requirements for completing the yearly Grant Performance Report (ED 524B). An example of activities to be performed may include:

• Analyze grant requirements, measures and data elements necessary to meet grant goals

• Provide timeline and responsibility sheet (collaboratively created with program director) for data collection and data analysis

• Train grant team (school counselors and school psychologists) in the data-driven program evaluation (and logic model) including but not limited to measuring academic and academic-related (i.e. behavior referrals, attendance) data, pre/post test results, disaggregating data (based on gender, ethnicity, grade level, etc.)

• Train grant team in the importance of collecting necessary results as required in the grant

• Mentor school counselors to create pre-post survey instruments

• Review analyzed data with district counselors, project director, administrators and other key staff

• Consult as needed with program director regarding personnel issues (job descriptions, evaluation tools)

• Consult as needed with program director regarding implementation of activities and in design of program documents

• Analyze measures of change in student/mental health including utilizing the California Healthy Kids Survey (CHKS) and/or other data tools as specified in the grant requirements and as related to program success

• Assist in data interpretation (results of program implementation, feedback on areas of improvement)

• Assist district in writing evaluator portions of the final evaluation report

• Provide technical assistance on reporting as requested