***** C E N S U S 2 0 0 0 B U L L E T I N ***** Vol. 3 - No. 3 Feb. 4, 1999 The Census Bureau is preparing to launch its Census in the Schools Project, "Making Sense of Census 2000," beginning with the mailing of notification letters and brochures later this month to school administrators and principals at 400,000 to 500,000 targeted public, private, tribal and Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) schools. The project is designed to help students learn what a census is and why it is important to them, their families and their communities, to participate in the census. It also will try to recruit teachers and parents to work as census-takers and in other census-related jobs. Targeted schools (about 20-to-25 percent of all schools) are located in hard-to-enumerate areas. Selection criteria required that more than 55 percent of their students be eligible for free lunches or that the schools be located in areas where more than 31 percent of children were living below the poverty level. For private schools to be targeted, their students' household income had to meet still-undefined thresholds. The Census Bureau's regional partnership specialists will select schools in areas where these criteria are not reliable. All BIA and tribal schools will be targeted. Following the initial mailing to principals and administrators beginning Feb. 20, a second mailing to teachers of elementary, middle and high schools will take place beginning March 1. It will include a letter and brochure explaining the project and a business reply card, with which teachers can indicate whether they want to participate. Once the card is received by Census Bureau-contractor Scholastic, Inc., teacher kits will be dispatched to the schools beginning in April 1999. The kits will be available for the following grade ranges: K-4, 5-8 and 9-12. These kits include an overview of Census 2000 and a 24-page teaching guide with specific lesson plans for the census-related subject matter. Also included is a 4-by-6-foot wall map depicting the distribution of the U.S. population. Materials for a proposed principal's kit, which would be mailed to targeted schools in January and February of 2000, consist of a letter, a poster called "Power of the Census," a flyer for use by the school's Parent-Teacher Association and a flyer for participating teachers. The project envisions delivery to the teachers of take-home letters for the students' parents written in English, Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Tagalog or Korean, explaining the importance of an accurate census. The take-home letters and a possible census quiz will be sent to the teachers in March 2000. Partnership specialists in the Census Bureau's 12 regional census centers will promote the Census Bureau's schools project with slide-show presentations, fact sheets titled "The Census Goes to School" and personal contacts. All of the materials used in the Census in the Schools Project also will be made available via the Internet at http://www.census.gov/dmd/ www/2khome.html. About 50,000 additional sets of teaching kits will be available for teachers at nontargeted schools. Specially tailored teaching kits will be sent to schools in Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands. For further information about the Census in the Schools project, contact Kimberly Crews of the Census 2000 Publicity Office on 301-457-3626 (fax: 301-457-4057; e-mail: <Kimberly.A.Crews(a)ccmail.census.gov>)v>).