| Grantee Name: | Borrego Springs Unified School District, CA |
| Project Name: | Frontier Liberty Fellowship |
| Project Director: | Consuela Smith |
| Funding: | $929,898 |
| Number of Teachers Served: | 90 |
| Number of School Districts Served: | 11 |
| Number of Students Served: | 37,591 |
| Grade Levels: | K-12 |
| Partners: | University of San Diego, San Diego Historical Society, American Institute of Historians and History Educators, the Bill of Rights Institute, the Civil War Society, and the American Institute for History Education |
| Topics: | Year 1, The Empire vs. the Colonies; Year 2, The Agrarian South and Industrializing North; Year 3, Liberal Democracy vs. Totalitarianism |
| Methods: | Colloquia, summer institutes, distance learning, mentoring |
The Frontier Liberty Fellowship has formed a consortium of 11 school districts in five states and the Virgin Islands to increase teacher knowledge of and student achievement in American history. Many of the districts are rural and isolated-in remote Louisiana parishes, farming country in Oklahoma and Mississippi, the California Sierras, and the Texas panhandle. Teacher Fellows selected for the project will attend 11 days of intensive colloquia and summer institutes exploring history content and teaching strategies and conducting historical research for the unit lessons they must create. Fellows will study the roots of American tradition including antecedent English documents and colonial charters, the American Revolution and its leaders, the Declaration of Independence and natural law tradition, the Federalist Papers and anti-federalist thought, the Bill of Rights, and constitutional leaders. Slavery, agrarian culture, the market economy of the North, the Civil War and Reconstruction will be other topics, along with Progressivism, World Wars I and II, up to the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.