East Evergreen Elementary School puts reading first

The Daily Inter Lake

A new reading program instituted at East Evergreen Elementary last year has produced some startlingly positive results.

Children who used to struggle with basic literacy, with only dim hopes of ever reading at their grade levels, are achieving remarkable gains under the Reading First federal grant.

"Our students are becoming successful readers across the board," East Evergreen Principal Linda DaVoe said. The school always has had its skilled readers, but "it had not been across the board before."

That newfound success boosts children's self-esteem, she said, helps them take pride in their learning.

"It makes them want to try," DaVoe said.

Reading First is a component of the federal No Child Left Behind law. It is targeted at having every child reading at grade level - when their skills match up with what is expected at that point in school - by the end of third grade.

Statistics show, DaVoe said, that if children don't reach that bar, there's better than a 90 percent chance they never will read at their appropriate age levels.

Teachers following the Reading First program offer 90 minutes of reading instruction daily for all students, appropriate to their grade levels.

Students identified for "strategic" instruction get an extra 30 minutes for pre-teaching and re-teaching during class time. Other students use this 30 minutes for reading enrichment.

Students identified for "intensive" instruction get all of this, plus an extra 30 minutes of daily help outside the classroom. Some of the students in the resource program stay with the rest of the class for the 90-minute core instruction, then move to the special education rooms for the outside 30-minute sessions.

"And the kids are getting it," reading coach Kari Murdock said of the resource students. "They see they can do it, they can learn."

But to achieve those results, teachers have to believe in the program and carry it out as prescribed.

"The program must be taught with fidelity," DaVoe said. "It is so research-based that we can't let teachers vary it. They have to follow the exact template."

Early on, she admitted, some teachers balked. Reading First represented a sea change in the way they taught. But now that dramatic results have proven the program's worth, all 21 teachers follow it step by step.

In the first year, Evergreen won $238,620 of the statewide grant shared by 13 schools including Somers-Lakeside. This year, Evergreen received $194,975. Next year's grant will be $174,298.

The grant was awarded, in part, because of the number of Evergreen students qualifying for free and reduced school lunch.

Children from poverty-level homes, on average, have a only 500-word vocabulary, putting them at a disadvantage when compared with children from language-rich family environments.

With this as a backdrop, had DaVoe attended a Reading First workshop in Helena in December 2004.

She learned then that the school qualified for grant money, but had only until April to research, write and submit the grant application. She had to get 100 percent of her staff on board, because of its fundamental shift in teaching style. She pulled it off, and won the grant.

At the beginning of the 2005 school year, one assessment showed a dismal rate of just 6 percent of Evergreen first-graders had mastered the skills that lead to reading at grade level. By last spring, that number had soared to 63 percent.

Measuring by the grant's own national, state and local monitoring system, Evergreen kindergarten students made a remarkable 42-percent gain in the first year - with just 28 percent of students reading at grade level in fall 2005, but 70 percent reaching that mark by last spring.

First-graders made a 27 percent overall gain and second-graders gained 22 percent. Third-graders posted a much less-dramatic 1.2 percent improvement. The earliest two grades made steady progress throughout the year, but second- and third-graders peaked on their winter testing then dropped noticeably in spring testing.

(The program grant covers only grades K-3 but, since East Evergreen is a K-4 school, fourth-graders are following the same reading program.)

DaVoe and Murdock point to the program's significant impact on factors beyond pure reading skills.

"We definitely saw a drop in the number of behavior referrals over last year," DaVoe said. Students are happier, she added, and more confident in their academic and personal successes.

Students who arrive early for school now are grabbing reading books and settling in for their own reading time - and doing so of their own volition.

This fall, she said, teachers for first-graders and older saw a marked improvement in the reading skills of their students.

State goals call for 75 percent of students to test "proficient" for their grade levels by the end of this school year, and 80 by the end of next school year.

Ultimately it will be 90 percent for all schools.

Reporter Nancy Kimball can be reached at 758-4483 or by e-mail at nkimball@dailyinterlake.com