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More than a hundred middle school students in Brighton and Commerce City this week wrap up a costly six-week experiment in intensive reading instruction that educators there say signals a shift in how the school district views “summer school.”
But the Read 180 project in Adams School District 27J also goes well beyond summer school. Officials there hope that come fall, they’ll be able to offer age-appropriate reading assistance to students who in the past didn’t get much help.
“It’s not all that long ago that we simply didn’t have much good stuff for reading intervention at the secondary level,” said Isobel Stevenson, executive director for student achievement for the school district. “My history with trying to get reading intervention at the secondary level goes back at least 10 years. We used to give up on teaching kids reading decoding skills after the fifth grade. If they didn’t get it by then, they wouldn’t get it.”
Thanks to a $180,000 Colorado Department of Education grant, District 27J was able to purchase the Read 180 curriculum, a highly regarded reading intervention program that combines computer software, individualized and small group instruction, audio tapes and teen-appropriate literature. The program was piloted at two schools – Vikan Middle School in Brighton and Brighton Heritage Academy, an alternative high school – beginning second semester of the past school year. By fall, it will be offered in those schools as well as the district’s other two middle schools and other two high schools.
This summer, the district made the program available to middle school students throughout the district, at one of two sites, Vikan and Prairie View Middle School in Commerce City.
Initially, 125 students were recruited for the summer reading classes, which met from 7:30 to 11 a.m. Monday through Friday, June 9 through July 18. A few dropped out, but by the mid-point of the program, 113 youngsters were in attendance.
All the students – most of whom will enter seventh or eighth grade in the fall, with a few incoming ninth-graders – were reading at well below grade level at the start of the program. Assessment tests three weeks ago showed marked improvement in their overall reading scores.
Trina Norris-Buck, assistant principal at Vikan and the principal for all middle-level summer schools, said she expects final assessments will show most students advanced one-half to one grade level in their reading proficiency over the course of the six-week program.
“I wish we could have had more kids in the program,” she said. “But this is a shift for our district. In the past, summer school was all about ‘you didn’t pass, so you have to go to summer school.’ But this program isn’t about not passing. This is about getting better.”
At Prairie View, middle-schooler Steven sat at the computer station and read softly into a microphone, a story about kayaking. The computer is equipped with voice recognition software. When he finished reading the passage, he got immediate feedback. He’d made no mistakes. He’d successfully read four entirely new words that he hadn’t encountered before, and his summer reading total was over 12,000 words.
“I like this,” he said, happily showing off his mastery of the computer program and the ease with which he could navigate through the morning’s assignment. “This is better than reading at home. The computer just helps you to read better. I really haven’t minded spending my summer at school doing this.”
While Steven and a handful of other students spent 20 minutes at the computers, others were meeting with the teacher for small group instruction and to work through their reading notebooks. Another group sat at desks reading silently from paper books, some reading along while listening to an audio book.
After 20 minutes, the groups swapped places, rotating through the various learning centers. “Twenty minutes seems to be the ideal amount of time for middle school students to try to focus,” Norris-Buck said.
The morning is broken up into two 90-minute sessions, with a snack break in the middle. Each 90-minute session includes 20 minutes of large-group instruction, followed by three 20-minute learning center sessions, then a 10-minute large-group wrap-up. The large groups have a 15/1 student/teacher ratio.
“The computer portion of it is really very efficient,” said Stevenson, who was formerly the principal at Angevine Middle School in Lafayette, where she first had exposure to the Read 180 program. “The initial purchase of the program is very expensive, but many other literacy programs operate on a student/teacher ratio of 5/1. Because of the way this model works, we’ve got the kids moving through the various stations, so even though the teacher has only five kids in front of him or her most of the time, there are 15 kids in the classroom. So it’s a very efficient model.”
Stevenson said the program will fill a hole in the school district’s range of services to middle and high school students.
“We simply didn’t have anything between what’s available in the regular classroom and identifying a child for special education services or ESL. The only way a kid would get additional literacy support was by labeling that kid disabled, which is immoral if not criminal,” she said.
Come fall, students who don’t qualify can ESL or special education services can sign up for a 90-minute Read 180 class as if it were simply another elective. It won’t supplant their regular language arts classes, but will supplement them, Norris-Buck said.
“I am so excited because this district is passionate about closing the achievement gap,” Stevenson said. “I think putting a really strong reading intervention program in at the secondary level really speaks to our belief that all students will learn.”
Other summer school grant recipients
The Colorado Department of Education’s Summer School Grant Program this year distributed approximately $1 million to Colorado school districts, charter schools and educational consortia to provide intensive summer instruction for students entering grades 5-8 who scored unsatisfactory in reading, writing and/or math on their 2007 CSAP.
The $180,704 grant to Brighton 27J was the largest such grant awarded this year, but certainly not the only one. Other grant recipients this summer:
Charter School Institute … $31,313
Denver Public Schools … $14,715
Eaton School District RE-2 … $36,283
Gunnison Watershed RE 1J … $10,475
Keenesburg Re-3j … $65,703
Mapleton Public Schools … $42,350
McClave RE-2 … $10.340
Montrose County RE 1J … $72.214
Northwest BOCES … $69,254
Park County Re-2 … $43.335
Pikes Peak BOCES … $151,655
Poudre School District … $71,030
Pueblo 60 … $126,000
Thompson R2-j … $32,626
Source: Colorado Department of Education
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