Jessieville schools adopt new math, reading curricula

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the final installment of a two-part series looking at Jessieville School District’s return to the classroom on Aug. 22.

JESSIEVILLE — The Jessieville School District has adopted new math and reading curricula this new school year that will offer a variety of different strategies for teachers to use with students to help them better grasp concepts.

“The state of Arkansas came out with a process for teachers’ curriculum to vet different curriculum products out there,” Jessieville Director of Curriculum and Instruction Kendal Glomski said.

“It’s Arkansas Instructional High Quality Instructional Materials, and it kind of takes you through this process of determining whether or not the curriculum, No. 1 — teaches to our standards for Arkansas, the usability for the teachers, and the rigor for the students,” she said.

According to the Division of Elementary and Secondary Education, in Arkansas, HQIM are curricula materials “aligned to state academic standards that include evidence-based strategies, inclusive practices, and embedded teacher supports.” The program takes into account the needs and experiences of diverse learners that are “actively literate, critical thinkers, and engaged in the community.”

To support districts in the use of HQIM, DESE partnered with an Instructional Materials and Professional Development network through the Council of Chief State School Officers and identified five key priorities to develop pathways to HQIM: communication, signaling quality, professional learning, educator preparation, and data and analysis.

Glomski said her volunteer committee of staff members spent the last several months looking at what the district currently uses and studying various reports to determine the quality of the material they are teaching.

“We got a couple of samples in from publishers. Teachers were able to put their hands on it, look at it, practice it with kids if they wanted to a couple days, and then we made some decisions. There’s a website called EdReports.org

and actually rates all of the curriculum based on the three things that we talked about. And so it really gives you an idea of the quality that we were using and the quality that we are going to be implementing,” she said.

Teachers in grades 3-8 will implement a program called Reveal Math next year, she said. According to publisher McGraw Hill, Reveal Math is “a complete K-12 core math program built on contemporary academic research and designed so all your students can succeed in mathematics.”

“We’re really excited about that,” Glomski said. “It has very high ratings. It’s going to boost the rigor, so that’s going to be a little bit of a struggle because there’ll be some gaps where the teachers, they can’t give up, and, you know, the students can’t give up — we’re just going to have to make sure that we raise the level of expectations for our students and walk them through that process of dealing, maybe, with more challenging material and questions.”

Students in grades K-5, this year, will be learning reading through a program called Amplified Core Language Arts. According to the program’s website, Amplify CKLA is a K-5 literacy curriculum that “inspires curiosity and drives results, empowering all students with rich background knowledge.”

“It teaches the standards and skills but also uses a lot of enriching content to teach those skills. So, for example, I believe it’s in fourth grade, they do a theme on medieval times, so it’s something that’s interesting to the students,” Glomski said.

“Yet the teachers can still teach those skills using that content. So I think that’ll be a great asset for our kids to learn that. It will also help our middle school and high school because they’ll have some prior knowledge as they get older of what some of those world history events are and things like that. So we’re really excited about that.”

She noted students in grades 6-12 showed growth last year in every subject area but two and that ninth and 10th graders showed growth in every single area. Glomski said she believes the new programs will only help students’ results continue to grow even more.