Situated in western Orange County, the Huntington Beach Union High School District (HBUHSD) enrolls more than 16,000 students. Approximately 45% of students were White, 22% were Asian American, 22% were Hispanic/Latino, 7% Native American, 1% Filipino, 1% African American, 1% Pacific Islander, and less than 1% multiracial. Twenty-one percent of HBUHSD students qualifed for free and reduced-price lunch through the National School Lunch Program, and 10% of students were English learners (EL).

HBUHSD was seeking to implement an adolescent literacy program for at-risk ninth-grade students, with the goal of strengthening students’ literacy skills and setting them on  track for college. Toward this end, the district offered threehigh schools the opportunity to pilot a new English 1 Intensive class that carefully integrated English 1 and READ 180 into a comprehensive and cohesive course of study that would meet the A–G requirements for University of California-approved course work.

During the 2008–2009 school year, the English 1 Intensive course was implemented with ninth-grade students in three classes in three different schools. The English 1 Intensive course combined the READ 180 90-minute instructional model with additional core literature designed to support the California Standards for ninth-grade English. Students who were selected to participate in the program scored a grade equivalent of 7.5 on the Vocabulary and Reading Comprehension Subtests of the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test^® (GMRT^®) in their eighth-grade year (in February 2008).