The School Development Program (SDP) is the organization charged with implementing the Comer Process in school communities. The Comer Process, a school and system-wide intervention formulated by Dr. James P. Comer, Maurice Falk Professor of Child Psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine's Child Study Center, aims to bridge child psychiatry and education.

Of all the prominent educational reformers, only James Comer talks about healthy child development as the keynote to academic achievement and life success. (See the full text of his article, "Schools that Develop Children") Dr. Comer uses a metaphor of six developmental pathways to characterize the lines along which children mature--physical, cognitive, psychological, language, social, and ethical. The SDP school community uses the six developmental pathways as a framework for making decisions that will benefit children. In schools using the Comer Process, far more is expected from the students than just cognitive development...more