Our Story
ECA's owner and President, Dennis Harlan, has studied effective strategies for implementing kit-based, performance-based science programs. He was the Co-Principal Investigator of a project funded by the National Science Foundation that documents, on video, effective practices used to implement and sustain materials-based, performance-based science programs.
An important aspect of implementing and sustaining an effective kit-based science program is materials management. The easy part of adopting a kit-based science program is buying the kits. The difficult part is to maintain the kits and sustain their use over time. This is due to publisher kits that lack all the necessary items to teach a unit, minimal time available for teachers to acquire those necessary items and to prepare materials for classroom use, storage space, and cursory and ineffective professional development training for teachers, school principals and other administrators.
It was the research related to the NSF project and feedback from the videos series that prompted Dennis Harlan to establish ECA Science Kit Services -- the first commercial and complete science kit management, refurbishment and replenishing service for school districts. With over two and half decades of research and experience, ECA’s staff is the most qualified team of professionals to assist school districts with implementing kit-based science programs from any publisher or any OER science program.
ECA provides these core services:
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Science Kit Management and Refurbishment/Replenishment Service (www.eca.bz/how-it-works) ECA provides full-service kit management and refurbishment services for most popular commercially available science programs and OER (Open Education Resource) science programs.
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Open Source (OER) and Custom Science Kit Sales
ECA makes science material kits that align to the most popular OER science programs complete with all items teachers need to teach the units. Kits include items that developers deemed “locally supplied. In addition we prep many items to a Ready-To-Teach condition.
ECA is a certified vendor for OpenSciEd material kits. (www.eca.bz/openscied)
- Custom Kits
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Live Materials Supply
ECA operates a full-service live materials facility that supplies live materials for most popular science programs.
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Professional Development Services
Call us or schedule a meeting. We will be happy to discuss your school district's needs and recommend the best materials support options for your science program.
Service is our priority at ECA. For over 25 years we have been servicing school districts nationally and we work hard to make sure that our service is convenient and cost-effective for school districts.
We look forward to being a part of your classrooms!