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8/28/2010
A school in crisis fights back
Valley Courier
By: Julia Wilson
(The Center Consolidated School District faces more challenges than most as they work to turn their school around. In 2009 90.09 percent of their 605 students qualified for free or reduced lunches and about 55 percent came from homes where English was not the primary language. This is Part 1 of a 2-part series.)
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| CENTER - In Spring 2010 Center Consolidated School superintendent George Welsh was notified that his district had been chosen for a Colorado Department of Education (CDE) grant.
This was a mixed blessing. One, it put Welsh on notice that his school was in the bottom 5th percentile of schools in the state, with elementary student growth consistently below the state average. The CSAP scores at Haskin Elementary School were abysmal in reading, writing and math, and something had to be done to turn the trend around.
The up-side was an infusion of money: $1.5 million to be administered over a three year period.
Welsh brought in a team of experts from the CDE to review the programs in place at the elementary level. For a week they roamed the halls of Haskin, sitting in classes and talking to teachers, students and support staff.
“We learned a lot from their report,” Welsh said. “One problem was that our programs were not consistent across grades. For example students in, say, one second grade class would not necessarily come out at the end of the year with the same knowledge of students in a different second grade class. The teachers had a great deal of flexibility in how they taught their classes and what material was covered.”
The team recommended the district change to the research-proven Lindamood-Bell teaching strategies and processes.
According to the official Lindamood-Bell website, the teaching methods were developed about 30 years ago by Nanci Bell and Patricia Lindamood.
Bell’s experience was in the treatment of language and literacy disorders. She conceptualized the theory that imagery is critical in both language comprehension and analytical thinking.
Lindamood’s expertise was in the fields of speech-language pathology and audiology. Lindamood received international acclaim for a diagnostic test and program of treatment she developed for “phonemic awareness and auditory conceptual function” that are still in use nationally and internationally.
The teachers at Haskin Elementary are receiving on-going support and training to implement the new curriculum. The district has hired an instructional coach and a Lindamood-Bell Interventionist/Staff Developer to make sure the new curriculum is properly followed.
“The Lindamood-Bell reading strategies increases neural connections in the brain of each student through a process of visualizing words and verbalizing sounds in a scientifically based repetitive manner to increase student vocabulary, comprehension and fluency,” Welsh said. “Feedback will allow us to target below grade level students with immediate intervention.”
During the school year there is after school help, and during the summer a Reading Academy that uses Lindamood-Bell strategies.
“The Board of Education fully supports the development of Haskin Elementary administrators and teachers and the academic programs we are implementing,” Welsh said. “They have the right approach. They say ‘this is what we want to do academically, and this is what we need to do it.’ Then they give us the support we need to accomplish it. They are about academics, and improving the resources we have to get the students where they need to be.”
Welsh said this is the attitude a good board of education and school administration has to have: Academics first.
“You can’t say ‘this is what we want to do academically, this is what we need to do it, but let’s use our resources to build a new gym.’ Academics have to come first. That’s what we are doing here. Our kids’ scores are going to dramatically increase with the direction we are going. You just watch and see.”
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