Ready for reading
Bodine receives $600,000 gift to take
dyslexia expertise to public schools
Bodine School has received a $600,000 gift from anonymous Memphis donors to expand its work with literacy and dyslexia in inner-city schools.
Through a partnership with Teach for America and KIPP charter schools in North and South Memphis, Bodine is dedicating faculty to the schools each week, starting with KIPP Memphis Collegiate Elementary on Henry Avenue in North Memphis. Next year, the partnership will expand to KIPP Memphis Preparatory Elementary, a new school in the Achievement School District, on Corry Road in South Memphis.
For nearly two years, Bodine has been offering training to public school teachers who wanted to learn the Orton-Gillingham techniques it uses to help children with dyslexia find alternative ways to learn to read. If teachers had to take a day of work to attend, Bodine paid for the substitute teacher.
But without a teacher in the school to reinforce the concepts or to help teachers work with 30 children in a class instead of the 10 at Bodine in Germantown, the work lost some steam, said Josh Clark, head of school at Bodine.
Bodine has deployed two staff members to KIPP in North Memphis. Their job is to help three teachers who took its four-day class this summer work it into their curriculum.
“At least once a week, they’re getting implementation feedback, which allows them to get better,” said Julie Poluszejko, assistant principal. “That’s huge for teachers.”
KIPP teachers, who have access to a school camera for videotaping lessons, can record their lessons for feedback later, Poluszejko said.
“One of the teachers is submitting her plans for feedback,” she said. “It’s another opportunity to get someone else looking at her lesson plans.”
Based on TCAP scores released
this summer, 67.4 percent of elementary and middle schoolchildren in Shelby County Schools do not read at grade level.
In the ASD, the bottom 5 percent of schools which the state is taking over and turning into charter schools, reading failure is 87.3 percent.
Clark considers that figure an epidemic.
With research that shows poverty creates many of the outward signs of dyslexia, including poor working memory and vocabulary, he wants Bodine to learn to tailor its programs for a much wider audience.
He hopes that will reduce the number of children, African-Americans in particular, who are referred for special education services because they cannot read.
“I truly believe this school can become a lab school for our city and that the work we are doing can be transferred throughout our region,” said Clark.
Bodine has considered creating a charter school or an annex in the innercity to share its teaching methods.
“It would be a bomb shelter in a war zone,” Clark said. “There’s no way we are going to get to that level with one teacher and 30 kids. But with this, oh, my gosh, look at the impact we can create.”
In 24 months, Clark intends to have a portable program that can fit in any public school.
“We’ll bring teachers and instructional leaders in for four or five days of training, and then provide the support they need to implement. The ultimate goal is to put trainers in other organizations,” Clark said.
“I’d love to get to the point where KIPP in North Memphis has someone so thoroughly trained and engrossed in this approach, they can support their own teachers. It is possible. I have no doubt about it.”