Erin Scott has spent her 17-year teaching career in Ozark, Ala., a small city school system tucked in the southeast corner of the state, less than an hour’s drivefrom the borders of Georgia and Florida. For more than half her professional life, Scott has specialized in reading intervention, most recently as a reading resource teacher at Joseph Lisenby Elementary, a Title I school where 65% of the students live in poverty. In early 2005, Lisenby agreed to join the Alabama Reading Initiative (ARI), a multiyear effort to implement a scientifically based approach to reading instruction in all schools with grades K-3. Scott became Lisenby’s ARI reading coach, a job that would require her to devote all of her time to school-based staff development. “I soon