Retta Brown anticipates more literacy intervention success

During a school board meeting this month, Retta Brown Elementary Principal Bethanie Hale spoke about the success of the school’s literacy initiative.

With the help of literacy facilitators and teachers, the number of “Tier 3” students has declined from 73 to “38 (at) the beginning of January,” signaling that its response to intervention (RTI) program is working, Hale said.

“We started out with 73 students out of 150 that were in need of Tier 3 intervention, which is the highest level of intervention,” she said. “We have built-in intervention time with guided reading as well as Dibbles and all of the other things that we’re doing.”

With funds from a Multi-Tiered System of Supports grant, the school was able to hire El Dorado alum Jewel Murphy as a paraprofessional who works strictly with K-1 students in Tier 2 and Tier 3 intervention, Hale said.

“I feel like if we can get them at the youngest possible age, maybe we won’t need that intervention when they get to third and fourth grade with those students if we can fill in those gaps early,” the principal said. “So (Murphy) pulls all of those students … maybe three, at the most, students and works with them. We’ve seen at the beginning of school 10 kindergartners that were in urgent intervention, in the red, and now we have one in kindergarten.”

She said she credits the school’s literacy facilitator, teachers and paraprofessionals with the success of the program.

“We’re not where we want to be, but we’re definitely going in the right direction,” Hale said.

In an attempt to cultivate a college-going culture, the El Dorado School District encourages students to wear college t-shirts every Wednesday. Hale said the school’s mission was to provide a collegiate shirt for all students to wear every College Wednesday.

“We started putting stuff on social media asking to bring old college t-shirts, buy new ones anytime they traveled during the summer, to donate and we now only need 24 t-shirts for the whole school … all the way from NYU to Wyoming, Wisconsin,” the principal said. “Lots of different states are represented so the kids know all the different opportunities that they have with the El Dorado Promise to go to college.”

Math literacy projects like the districtwide reading of “The Lemonade War” and Retta Bucks, both sponsored by Simmons Bank, have fostered great morale among students as well, she said.

Students earn Retta Bucks by behaving well in class and doing good deeds around the school. Twice a month, they can go buy pencils, have “lunch with a friend” passes and even get backpacks with their Retta Bucks. Hale said that she’s working with Simmons to incorporate a checkbook into the program for fourth grade that will incorporate math skills as well as life skills like balancing a checkbook and budgeting.