School boosts literacy rate in younger students
Officials says many are meeting or exceeding expected reading levels
A local school that has been struggling with student illiteracy took a giant leap forward this past year, according to its reading teachers.
Belle Haven Elementary School officials say that at the end of the 2016-17 school year, 45 percent of students are meeting or exceeding their grade level and 50 percent are nearing proficiency, with just 5 percent still lagging.
The school is part of the Ravenswood City School District, which saw just 19 percent of students scoring proficient in English in state tests taken in 2015. In math, just 12 percent were proficient.
Roughly 75 percent of Ravenswood students are English language learners.
Belle Haven experienced the largest gains in reading proficiency of all Ravenswood schools this past school year. Costano Elementary was next at 30 percent, Brentwood at 25 percent and Los Robles at 23 percent, according to figures provided by district publicist Rolando Bonilla.
Rebecca Payne, one of the school’s three reading teachers, attributes the improved literacy rates to a deliberate push by Principal Todd Gaviglio to get more young students into specialized training.
The teachers use Reading Recovery, a nationwide model that employs intensive one-one-one literacy training for struggling first-graders. The sessions run 30 minutes a day for between 12 and 20 weeks. The teachers also hold 30-minute group sessions for three to five kindergartnersthrough second-graders at a time daily, for up to 40 weeks.
In addition, reading teachers this past year received their own classrooms, where in previous years they shared one classroom, often holding sessions at the same time. The new reading rooms are now in a separate, formerly underutilized wing of the campus.
“This is very luxurious, to be a reading teacher and have this much space,” Payne said in her classroom June 9. “You can do a lot more things in your own space.”
Payne’s classroom is filled with shelves holding books, easels for kids to write words or arrange magnetized letters, a comfortable reading area, and tables for groups of three to five to meet at a time or to conduct more specialized one-on-one instruction. She said she can have some kids working on dialogue while others work on their fluency or write in their journal, which wasn’t possible when “we sometimes talked over one another” before.
With the new focus, Payne said the reading teachers worked with 76 students, a near 100 percent jump over 2015-16 when 40 kids received group or individual sessions. Thirty-five percent of the school’s K-2 students worked with the reading teachers this past year. While not all of the kids who received specialized instruction are proficient, the sessions have kept any from falling further down the achievement gap, Payne said.
“What we’re able to do is actually get these students’ scores up and prevent a lot of students that would have been maybe identified for special ed,” Payne said.
The reading teachers only work with the K-2 grades primarily due to the cost of running the program.
“It’s just so expensive,” reading teacher Ronda White said.
White said it costs the district roughly $1.2 million each year to pay for 13 reading teachers. Those salaries and program materials are funded in large part by The Tosa Foundation, a family foundation run by Portola Valley’s Tashia and John Morgridge, former CEO of Cisco.
“The only way we operate is because of the kindness and goodness of Tashia and John Morgridge, that’s our reality,” White said.
“We are extremely grateful to Tashia and John Morgridge for their unfaltering support of the district’s children,” added Ravenswood Superintendent Gloria HernandezGoff in an emailed statement. The Morgridges also financially support the Children’s Health Council, which supports the district’s parent training programs, after-school programs and coaching support for K-2 teachers and have done so for more than 20 years.
What about outgoing second-graders who enter third grade without being proficient?
Payne said All Students Matter, a group of retired teachers and stay-at-home mothers with college degrees who work with Ravenswood schools, has offered to work with students in the latter grades struggling with proficiency next school year. About 40 volunteers have signed on to be on campus during school hours, she said. Some of the outgoing second-graders will also attend summer school.
The school held a celebration event June 9 for the 76 students who went through Reading Recovery and other reading teacher instruction, at which each student received two books at their reading level, a certificate of their achievement and other goodies. The students, if they don’t continue in summer school, will have access to Raz Kids, a district-provided e-book library.
“It is important for kids to continue reading over the summer to prevent the summer slide in reading levels,” Payne said.