Supporting struggling readers

One of the interventions that we’ve established for entering freshmen is a program that aims to have all students reading at grade level by the time they exit high school. Based on data reviewed from the 8th grade year, students who are reading below grade level are required to take a literacy enhancement class. The class focuses on strategies to increase decoding, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. As the Program of Studies describes, literacy teachers Angela Christina and Shannon Stanton help kids increase their comprehension of a variety of materials of varying length and complexity, analyze and interpret what they read in the process of becoming critical readers, and help them learn to write effectively in a variety of formats for a language according to current standards of correctness. You can check out more details about the program at http://hs.skschools.net/LiteracyEnhancement/ This is the fifth year Angela and Shannon have been working together and their results have been impressive. They recently completed assessing their students (mostly ninth and tenth graders) whom they test in the middle and at the end of the year. 94% of the 10th grade students increased their comprehension from the beginning of the year (I don’t have the ninth grade stats as of this posting). Close to half are reading at the ninth grade level which indicates they will be on grade level by June. One of the reasons we’ve seen a steady increase in our reading scores on the NECAP with kids who move from 2s (partially proficient) to 3s (proficient) or 1s (substantially below proficiency) to 2s is due to the work of Angela and Shannon. Our Assistant Superintendent, Mary Kelley, has also been instrumental in developing our capacity as a high school to support struggling readers. In addition to the direct reading intervention support, Diane Kern from URI, has been working with our social studies department for the past calendar year, providing best practice teaching strategies to our social studies teachers and working intensively with a few of them. One of the challenges in high schools is creating structures to provide targeted interventions for students such as literacy enhancement while at the same time attempting to provide meaningful professional development for content-area teachers in these same areas so they can incorporate or reinforce the skill-building within the content, specifically in literacy, writing, numeracy and problem solving for all students. We know if kids can read, write and problem solve, they can be successful in any content-area and job field.