The four initial sites were selected from projects outlined in the original proposal to the National Science Foundation. To develop new sites for the project's second academic year, we sponsored an internal competition in the school district. This proved to be an extremely successful mechanism for stimulating interest among schools across the city. Thirty-two of the city's eighty schools submitted proposals. A review committee representing a broad cross-section of the local educational community (teachers, principals, administrators, school board members and parents) selected seven sites for implementation as second-year sites.
The request for proposals (RFP) offered schools guidelines for their participation. The guidelines included the national goals of addressing isolation , equity and restructuring and specific local goals of CK:P . The RFP emphasized that curriculum projects should foster higher-order skills such as reasoning and problem-solving. The full text of the RFP, a description of the review process and the text of the successful proposals are all available on the project gopher server, where other school districts can easily refer to them.
The RFP process marked a major step toward institutionalization of networking technology in the Pittsburgh Public Schools. All submitted proposals addressed the school district's mandate for restructuring and proposed to use network resources in support of this goal. The network design teams that were formed in response to the RFP all received the support of their school principals, enabling them to schedule their time for training at the CK:P beta site.
The extensive work done on most proposals showed a degree of teacher buy-in to the activity which makes us confident that the winning proposals will all be successfully implemented and maintained. Further evidence for this comes from what has occurred at sites not chosen in the first round of proposals. At a number of sites, principals and network design teams are seeking alternative funding so as to be able to implement their projects without financial support from CK:P.