In 2006, Springfield Public Schools and Chicopee Public Schools were awarded $16,655,483 over five years for the Springfield/Chicopee Striving Readers Project. Both districts are located in southwestern Massachusetts and have a history of partnering on initiatives to improve student achievement. The Strategic Instruction Model Content Enhancement Routines for Teachers (SIM-CERT), developed by the Center for Research on Learning at the University of Kansas, was used as a whole-school intervention strategy in the five participating high schools. For targeted interventions, Scholastic’s READ 180 and the University of Kansas’s Xtreme Reading were both implemented. The project originally targeted seven thousand students in grades 9–11, and has since expanded to serve twelfth graders, as capacity has allowed.