Striving Readers Grant is an Opportunity for the Whole Community

You may remember that Rugby Public Schools was awarded a North Dakota Striving Readers Grant this past fall. It is a federal grant aimed at improving literacy from birth to grade 12. This a wonderful opportunity for our schools, but also for our community! 

Not only do we have some exciting new things going on in K-12 due to this grant, but we are now able to provide literacy programming for children in our community who are in the birth to age five range. 

Karen Black and Gail Rham have been hired to assist us with the birth to age five literacy programming in our community.  Many of you will recognize these names as they were both teachers at Ely Elementary for many years.  They have extensive knowledge working with young students, and are very excited to start working with little ones in our community. 

The Heart of American Library and many of Rugby’s daycare providers have agreed to take part in this literacy programming.  Twice a month Karen and Gail will be doing Story Hour at the Heart of America Library.  This month’s topic will be “Rhyming, Sequencing, and Retelling.”  Story Hour is every Friday from 10:15-11:00AM. We hope to see more families attend this great opportunity!
Similar programming will be provided to our local childcare providers. Mrs. Black and Mrs. Rham will be working with the following childcare providers, Growing Place Daycare, The Kids Next Door, Mindy Stier, Connie Grove, Mandy Kuhnhenn, and Terry Lemar. 

RPS has partnered with the Heart of America Johnson Clinic and the First District Health Unit.  RPS will be providing books to both clinics.  The medical providers will provide books to babies and toddlers as they come in for their well-child visits, as well as continuing to talk about the importance of literacy at an early age. 

Reading, rhyming, singing, and talking — beginning from birth — profoundly influence literacy and language development, the foundations for all other learning! 

The Barrier of Time

I have been thinking about the structure of our school calendar for a long time. It is incredibly difficult to lead complex change within our current calendar. Staff development for educators often occurs during small chunks of time throughout the year (early outs and late starts). Due to our school calendar a considerable amount of time passes between each training. This makes it difficult to develop momentum and continuity from one training to the next. Quality staff development should be continuous and job-embedded. Due to our schedule and the busyness of the school day, learning something new is often placed on the back burner due to more pressing issues.

I did a small study of the large employers within our community. I wanted to see how the other large employers invest in staff development. The graph below compares the annual amount of hours for staff development for each employee classification.

Note: HAMC = Heart of America Medical Center, JD = John Deere, Bremer Bank, FIB = First International Bank, and RPSD = Rugby Public School District. 

Unfortunately, I wasn’t shocked from the data in the chart above. Our teachers receive significantly less staff development than other professional positions within our community. This is a problem and schools need to build more time for staff development into their schedule. We should be investing in our teachers and support staff like the hospital, banks, and area agricultural businesses. 

Here are our core initiatives: 

Professional Learning Communities 

Teachers are grouped by grade level and subject area and these meetings occur every Wednesday from 8:00 - 9:00 AM. Each group focuses on these four questions: 1) What do we want students to know and be able to do? 2) How will we know if they can do it? 3) What will we do for students who already can do what is expected? 4) What will we do to support and help students who have not achieved the standards?

Standards-Based and Competency-Based Learning

Students at Ely Elementary have been receiving what we call a standards-based report card throughout their school experience. This method of reporting progress is helpful to parents and educators to identify weak areas for the student. It allows teachers and support staff to apply appropriate interventions to improve these identified areas. 

Social and Emotional Wellness

A recent student survey indicated that our students are less happy and have been experiencing an increase in depression. The reported increase in depression is not a localized problem that is only impacting our community. State and national survey results suggest that this is a state and national problem for adolescents and adults. To be proactive, we have recently implemented a curriculum that focuses on social and emotional wellness. All students take part in social and emotional wellness activities on a weekly basis. 

Literacy Curriculum and Instruction

Our school district was awarded a $700,000 Striving Readers Grant to focus on literacy from birth to grade 12. We have purchased a new English and Language Arts curriculum for grades K-6. We have also purchased a new intervention curriculum for struggling readers as well. These new curricula will be implemented during the 2019-2020 school year. 

Each of the above mentioned core initiatives require an immense amount of time to carry out with fidelity. For us to continue to build a great school system, we need more time. We are in the midst of developing a calendar that will address the time issue. The proposed calendar will provide 60 hours of staff development time along with approximately 30 hours of late start time for teacher collaboration. We believe the new calendar for the 2019-2020 school year will help us manage our initiatives in a more efficient way. The 2019-2020 school calendar will be approved within the next few months.