superintendent of the year nominations

development process we identified the priority of providing effective reading instruction and strong, researched based interventions for our students with disabilities relative to our mission. We believe that both the cultural change and changes in practice resulting from our commitment to developing a sound Response to Intervention (RTI) approach, have been the keys to closing the district level gap and to ensuring increased growth and achievement for this sub group. Teachers have undergone extensive staff development; been engaged in targeted collaboration; developed an effective core approach to instruction; adjusted instruction as a result of formative assessment; and have been provided more support to address students' needs as part of this change. Over the past three years we have seen the reading proficiency improve for our SWD sub group by 10.4%. Specifically, scores improved from 64.7% in 2010 to 75% in 2011 and 75.4% in 2012. We have seen the greatest gains from students who were scoring at the lowest levels. In 2010, 11.4% of our SWD sub group scored "Below Basic" in reading, the lowest level. This improved by 2.7% when 8.7% scored "Below Basic" in 2011. In 2012 improvement was made again. This time we saw a 3.4% improvement when 5.3% scored at the "Below Basic" level. Through RTI, effective practice and a changing culture we have cut the percentage of students scoring below basic more than in half (from 11.4% to 5.3%) in three years. We are encouraged about the opportunity to make even greater improvement by continually improving on our RTI approach to target students’ needs. A snapshot of our RTI process starts with supporting the students first through the strengths of the general classroom teacher. We recognized the need for a consistent common classroom, or Tier I, instructional approach that really targeted the skills necessary to improve reading fluency and comprehension. Therefore, we trained the entire PK-8 group of general classroom and reading teachers to support students with the use of Wilson's Fundations as well as a number of other research-based reading interventions to complement our core reading instruction. For students that need a more intensive classroom intervention, we also trained a number of teachers in the comprehensive Wilson Reading Program. Specialists were reassigned to spend much more time assisting in the general classroom as opposed to being pulled out to tutor small numbers of students on a frequent basis. They also spend time training our staff in instructional nuances that can be used to support their core instruction. All of our PK-8 classroom teachers have also been trained to use the AIMsWeb as a benchmark assessment and progress monitoring tool. Collaborative time was established so that twice a week teachers can evaluate student progress together and use their collective strengths to plan for improvement. After a benchmark assessments, teachers review data and identify students not making necessary progress. The classroom teacher then examines instructional approaches and decides which research-based classroom interventions may be utilized. The student is then assessed, or monitored, more frequently between benchmark assessment periods to provide the teacher critical information to aide her efforts. If progress is not made in a manner that closes the gap by the next benchmark assessment a more intensive intervention can be considered by the RTI team. Teachers are encouraged by the RTI team approach because they can collectively harness their strengths to serve students and can see how their efforts are making a difference. It encourages best practice instruction, proper use of formative assessment, and more powerful professional collaboration. Students are encouraged because they are given specific strategies to improve and which are suited to their needs as opposed to what used to be most prevalent in the world of intervention, just more work for longer periods of time. Most importantly, we are getting closer to our goal of having all students learn to read at a high level.

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