ON THE SAME PAGE

There’s nothing quite as exciting as the first day of school. Clean, new clothes, unopened notebooks and unsharpened pencils, even the gleam of the desktop speak to the promise of the new year as yet undiscovered.

And it’s not just the students who feel the electricity of what’s to come with the first day of class. In the lower grades of Mountain Home Public Schools, the teachers also have something new to open the year: a new reading program designed to help keep classes aligned as they progress through the year.

It’s enough to make first-grade teacher Brittany Reeves, now in her third year in the district, positively giddy.

“What I love the most about this program is the vertical alignment of topics,” she said. “These kids are going to be able to take their background knowledge each year and just keep building on it. That’s a total game-changer and one of my favorite parts of the program.”

The science of reading requires the mastery of five pillars: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. Under Mountain Home’s previous reading program, only phonemic awareness and phonics were consistent across grades K-5. The new program brings all of the reading instruction into alignment, said Reeves, who has also taught fourth, fifth and sixth graders during her career and thus has seen how a discordant program affects learning later on.

“Our new program builds the foundation for their comprehension skills at the first-grade level and teaches them how to work with the text,” she said. “It really aligns with the science of reading, which is a really big focus right now in education throughout the entire United States. We’re able to hit all of those big five components of literacy that we know kids need. They get that strong foundation as they move up to those grades and can transition from learning to read to reading to learn.”

Improvement or not, selecting and implementing a new curriculum is not an unsubstantial task.

“We developed a committee with teachers representing every grade level,” said Dr. Caroline Nail, assistant superintendent of teaching and learning for the district. “We had teachers that were on special assignment, people from different departments like our dyslexia program, and we had a whole plethora of people spanning kindergarten through senior high representatives.

Dr. Carline Nail, Assistant Superintendent of Teaching and Learning

Photo courtesy of Mountain Home Public Schools

“We did an audit of resources we were utilizing for our literacy program. What we found was we had a lot of great things going on, but we did not have any materials that spanned multiple grade levels. So, the committee met and decided to start reviewing new programs. There’s a lot of rules that we have to abide by in this, and it is very important that we’re making sure we are following those rules.”

The committee narrowed the choice of teaching programs down to two and invited representatives from the respective companies to come and make a presentation. Ultimately Benchmark was recommended to the school board which approved its purchase. With the program in hand, the work was just beginning.

“I’m going to brag on our district,” said Nail. “We didn’t just stop when the board approved it. We met this spring and went over it with our teachers and said, ‘OK, here’s the program,’ and did a deep dive into the lessons. We worked with our teachers about the pacing and what materials they would need to ensure this is a success. Then this summer, we had two different training sessions.”

“We worked with our teachers about the pacing and what materials they are going to need to ensure this is a success.”

— DR. CAROLINE NAIL, ASSISTANT SUPERINTENDENT OF TEACHING AND LEARNING

Through these extra work sessions, educators and their leadership worked together to create pacing and support schedules to help ensure no student slipped through the cracks. Even the supervisory responsibilities are planned down to chapter and verse.

“We have actually the full year paced out for which units and lessons and when they are going to be,” said Laurie Cramton, principal at Nelson-WilksHerron Elementary. “That means I can, as the principal, walk into one first-grade classroom and I know that I’m going to see in unit five week two. Then I can go next door, and I’m going to see the same thing.

“That’s not to say they’re teaching it exactly the same way because that’s the art of teaching. But with the program we chose, it’s the same science of teaching, and it links beautifully with the science of reading to ensure that we’re using a structured literacy approach.”

For teachers like Reeves, seeing fellow educators and administrators go to such lengths on behalf of the students was eye-opening.

“When everyone showed up for all of the training days, that’s not something that you usually see,” she said. “We really love our summers, but everyone showed up and was like, ‘Where are my materials? I want to start digging into this.’

“That’s not something that I saw in my previous district. To have that kind of commitment was kind of breathtaking. Maybe we’re in the honeymoon phase right now, but everyone’s ready to go.”

Laurie Cramton, principal at Nelson- Wilks-Herron Elementary with firstgrade teacher Brittany Reeves in the library. (Opposite) Reeves teaching one of her students with the new Benchmark program. (Above) Dr. Caroline Nail.

Photo by Jason Masters