Blog #12
Feb. 26, 2019 – Early Intervention
The evidence is irrefutable.
The key to successful graduation from high school starts in the earliest grades.
It starts with mastering the basic building blocks of reading and math.
This is not an issue for debate—as a KIDS COUNT special report found in 2010, reading proficiently by the end of third grade is a make-or-break benchmark in a child’s educational development.
Up until the end of third grade, most children are learning to read. “Beginning in fourth grade,” concluded the report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, “they are reading to learn, using their skills to gain more information in subjects such as math and science, to solve problems, to think critically about what they are learning, and to act upon and share that knowledge in the world around them.”
In short, it’s our job and it’s our responsibility to make sure students are on grade level with these core skills by the time they leave third grade. We can’t expect students to keep up with their peers in fourth grade and beyond if their tool kits aren’t in place so they can compete.
That’s why are we are so excited about the Instructional Support Assistants (ISAs) who arrived at Alice Terry Elementary School and Fort Logan Northgate School in January and February this year. In all, there are 15 ISAs working in all the district classrooms from kindergarten through third grade.
The ISAs were hired after a rigorous process from a pool of 60 applications. They group includes many educators with experience in school—including a teaching assistant from our own Early Childhood Center, a December graduate of the University of Northern Colorado who completed her student teaching in the fall in Weld County, and a former teacher from Pinnacle Charter School.
All 15 ISAs were also given meaningful professional development before starting work classrooms so they grasp essential strategies for teaching reading and math and also so they are oriented to our “Beyond Textbooks” curriculum and approach to classroom work.
Importantly, ISAs will not be relegated to classroom chores. These individuals are in classrooms to support instruction, as their job title makes clear. These are positions that will allow groups of students to receive more personal, customized instruction and specifically meet the needs of individual or groups of students, whether it’s our strongest students or those who need help to reach grade level.
This is about more attention, more focus, more close-up and personalized instructional work to do everything we can to ensure students are moving up and moving along at grade level—and not showing up in fourth grade already far behind the pack.
I really want to thank Blanche Kapushion, Sheridan’s Director of Student Achievement, for overseeing the entire ISA program, both the hiring and training process. As she has noted, however, the addition of these 15 positions to the district staff has been a seamless one thanks to solid teamwork across the board from our human resources office and all our school leaders, too.
I also want to thank the community for supporting our mill levy election last November. While we were planning to implement a strategy along these lines even if the mill levy did not pass, the community’s support allowed for quicker and thorough implementation. Your confidence means everything to us.
We will be following these classrooms closely and will keep you posted on the progress. We owe it to you to tell you how these programs are working. We also owe it to the students to make sure they don’t fall behind.