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District’s i-Ready program shows promising results, inconsistencies

Board of Education meets to assess data on latest effort to get students on grade level in math and reading

By Hannah LaClaire - Staff Writer | Dec 20, 2017

NASHUA – The Board of Education Curriculum and Evaluation Committee met Monday night to discuss last year’s i-Ready tutoring results, and Assistant Superintendent Garth McKinney said the data is clear: time and support works.

As part of the Board’s ongoing effort to get students on grade level in math and reading by third grade, the district used a $64,000 Dropout Prevention Grant to set up a tutoring program for first- and second-grade students who were approximately two grade levels behind in reading.

The program, which was put together in two weeks, ran from March to June 2017 when the funds were depleted. The program involved 270 students tutored by 45 teachers in more than 200 additional hours of instruction. Data is available for 267 of those students.

McKinney met with principals last week to go over the data and their impressions, and discussed those findings with board members Howard Coffman, Elizabeth Van Twuyver, George Farrington, Robert Hallowell, Dotty Oden, David Murotake and Doris Hohensee on Monday.

“This is just one data point of one of the ways the district might consider remediating the low reading levels for elementary students,” Murotake said.

This was just a pilot program, McKinney said, and there was a great deal of variation between the schools.

Some schools had as many as eight teachers involved, others had only one or two. Some of the schools had the additional instruction during the day, while others met after school, and the number of days per week varied from two to four. The types of materials used also varied broadly, although Coffman suggested this was an asset, since teachers were given the flexibility to choose which materials would work best for certain students.

Some at the meeting expressed concern that there was no control group, but others argued that the students who were not being tutored filled that role.

If the district chooses to move forward, McKinney said, there will need to be more consistency within how the program is run.

Overall, he said, “Was it successful? Yeah. Kids will always benefit from additional support.”

However, the results showed that the program was drastically more successful for the second graders than the first. The reason is being investigated, according to the report.

Of the 267 whose data was available, 143 students “made significant progress toward being on grade level,” 104 who were below at the beginning finished on grade level, and 39 who were two or more grade levels below finished one level below.

“It’s pretty amazing, the results that we got,” Hallowell said, but cautioned that it was not all-inclusive and was missing some information.

Murotake said that while he feels the administrators did a “heroic job” putting the program together so rapidly, they need to look at the data qualitatively, and interview the teachers about what methods they used and how successful they were.

He also suggested that the teachers be brought together as a group to discuss their programs.

The grant money the district used is not available again this year, so the district will need to investigate where they could find money to continue a more refined version of the program.

The teachers who assisted were provided $25 per hour, and Coffman said that at the last meeting, the high school students expressed interest from their peers in helping the teachers in tutoring.

It should be clear, he said, that “every student who needs (extra help) should get it,” and that additional hurdles like transportation would need to be sorted out, but that it was necessary.

“This problem needs to be fixed,” Van Twuyver said, adding that she hopes the administration’s upcoming budget will have a strong emphasis on reading remediation.

“(Because) every year goes by, and we end up a little bit more behind,” she said.

Hannah LaClaire can be reached at 594-1243 or hlaclaire@nashua

telegraph.com.

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