Officials with the Red Cay School District are touting some successes in early literacy.
At a Board of Education meeting last week, the district’s Manager of Teaching, Learning, and Assessment, Corey Heacock, presented data on reading among children in kindergarten through fifth grade, and pointed to several successes. One assessment, Acadience, measures students in kindergarten and first grade, and Heacock was optimistic about progress so far.
“We are seeing progress in the number of students and the percentage of students meeting benchmarks,” she said. “First grade’s actually in line with our targets for our strategic plan. Kindergarten’s just shy of that target, but we're continuing our push.”
Looking at students in grades 3 - 5, Heacock said that while individual cohorts of students are showing progress on the Smarter Balance Assessment Consortium, there’s more work to do.
“Our overall rates have been very flat since the start of the strategic plan, and we are committed to increasing those SBAC proficiency rates,” she said.
The district is seeing success in one specific part of reading education, she added.
“We can see that we are slowly increasing our achievement level in phonics,” Heacock explained.
One priority for the district has been bridging the gap between the youngest learners and those slightly older, said Tawanda Bond, Red Clay’s senior director of teaching and learning.
“This work doesn't just reside in the K - three space,” she said. “We've been leaning into the alignment between pre-K and K because we understand that those foundational skills at that space are very important.”
Bolstering the district’s efforts to increase early literacy is a large infusion of grant money from the state. This year, the district is getting some $877,000 from a Bridge to Practice grant.
Early literacy has been a significant priority for Governor Matt Meyer’s administration. Early in his term, Meyer declared a literacy emergency after Delaware eighth graders saw their lowest reading scores in almost three decades. That prompted the creation of an early literacy strategy and allocation of millions of dollars in Bridge to Practice grants for schools.
