As one of the world's leading forest products companies, Champion International (acquired by International Paper Company in 2000) strove to excel in every facet of its business life, including strong support of the communities in which employees lived and worked. For many years the company's corporate contributions program targeted education as a top priority.

In 1989, when the Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development issued a nationwide challenge in its seminal study, Turning Points: Preparing American Youth for the 21st Century, Champion's response was to establish the Champion Middle School Partnership, a business/education partnership with the middle-level schools in several of its largest operating communities.

Two powerful company beliefs drove this multimillion-dollar commitment to education:

• That every young person in its communities deserved the best possible education, particularly those at that critical stage of development, early adolescence, and
• That America could do a better job of educating its future workforce.

The initiative went right to the heart and soul of middle-level education, identifying what it took to reach and teach young adolescents, because it recognized the varied and particular challenges this group faced. The partnership built a solid, 12-year (1989–2001) record of helping its communities redesign their middle level schools through staff development. The program had three distinct stages within each community — Phase I: Getting Acquainted (six months to one year); Phase II: Intensive Restructuring (five years); and Phase III: Continuous Improvement (beyond the five years).

The model specifically built for the partnership was led by a team of 12 nationally recognized consultants. This lead team headed up the tightly integrated program, and from this core of 12, each school district had a site team that included a regional manager and two to four consultants. Then each individual middle school within the district named its own leadership team that included four to six teachers, the principal and one of the 12 consultants.

Over its tenure, the partnership benefited 51 schools in nine states, reaching more than 2,500 teachers and administrators, and almost 25,000 students. It organized all 51 schools around interdisciplinary teams instead of the outdated one-teacher, one-classroom structure. Over the 12 years, partner schools reported steady progress on a wide range of measures, including higher test scores, improved writing skills, fewer discipline problems, increased parent involvement, more active learning by doing, greater use of technology and higher teacher morale.

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