• The number of students entering the High School Honors Program, the core program, and number of faculty mentors has expanded. The offer of modest funds to cover supply costs was a useful sweetner to attract faculty. Up to eight high schools are now participating.
• A unique hands-on curriculum was developed by expanding a commercially available laboratory exercise for grade school children. The curriculum matches up with the mathematics that the students are learning and the descriptive writing. Thus, the program feeds the entire Advanced and Gifted program for 4th and 5th grade students.
• The outcome survey has been returned by 80 past participants. With only one or two exceptions, the alumni are very enthusiastic about their experience in the program and encourage its continuation and expansion.

• Hurrican Fran shut down local schools for two weeks or longer. This necessitated much rescheduling. Some students were impacted by the floods (eastern NC was divided up into little islands for days) as were faculty. This required patience on everyone's part as lectures and research were re-scheduled.
• Although a superb lecture series is organized and runs from October to the end of March, teachers seldom attend. First we added credit for continuing education and then Pitt County Schools made it mandatory once a month for the contact teacher at each high school. But, attempts to get other science teachers to attend have failed.
• This program is ending. The renewal with HHMI calls for expansion or new directions, but I still want to maintain an active research laboratory. It has been difficult to find another source of funds. Attempts to raise funds for an endowment in the Medical Foundation were thwarted by the Medical Foundation itself. Seems that every name that I wanted to hit for money was already targeted and I was told to stay away. I feel like both hands are tied behind my back.

• Delta Education (http://www.delta-ed.com/index.html) was the source for the grade school animal behavior curriculum. They have a variety of laboratory exercises designed for different grades in the K - 8 school years. Some of their kits look to be very good and useful for teachers.
• The North Carolina Association for Biomedical Research has established a series of professional development seminars. These are day long and held at the different NC medical schools. The teachers are given tours of the laboratories, introduced to the use of animals in research, ethics of clinical trials and have faculty introduce medical research to them. They are given a variety of resources for class room exercises, including those from HHMI. Their web page, http://www.ncabr.org/index, contains sample lesson plans from different web pages with links, information about research for teachers and students, and much more.

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