More than 200 high school students and their chaperones from 19 U.S. school districts will be in Madison from Wednesday through Saturday for the MSAN Student Conference, presented by the UW-Madison School of Education annually to develop student leaders dedicated to ending racial disparities in achievement and opportunity.

Hosted this year by the Middleton-Cross Plains Area School District, where students helped plan conference events, the gathering will take place mainly at the Madison Concourse Hotel but will feature guided tours of schools and colleges at UW-Madison on Thursday morning and a resource fair at Memorial Union that afternoon. View the conference program.

The Minority Student Achievement Network (MSAN), a project of UW-Madison's Wisconsin Center for Education Research, is a national coalition of multiracial school districts that have come together to understand and eliminate opportunity/achievement gaps that persist in their schools. MSAN districts have student populations between 3,000 and 33,000 and are most often located in well-established first-ring suburbs or small/mid-size cities. Additionally, the districts share a history of high academic achievement and connections to major research universities.