Local administrators apprised USD 257 Board of Education members of the district’s Title I program Monday night and the challenges they face with the implementation of new goals.
“The bar is set higher, but that’s what we need if we expect our students to meet state standards,” said Angie Linn, who serves as principal for preschoolers and kindergarteners at Lincoln Elementary. Linn also oversees the Age-to-Age Preschool at Windsor Place and is director of curriculum for the district.
The new standards are a combination of federal and state guidelines.
Monday’s presentations involved just the language arts curriculum and how well students are learning to read and write.
About 40 percent of students from kindergarten through fifth grade receive some level of Title I services, which help students who are falling behind their expected learning levels. Of that 40 percent, 20 percent are special needs students.
The 40 percent, “is not unusual for our region,” said Jack Stanley, principal at Iola Middle School, referring to the area’s high level of poverty.
A “snapshot” of student learning levels is taken during the first two weeks of the school year. This year showed that of 584 students in kindergarten through fifth grade, 45 percent is at a high risk of needing special education services; another 28 percent are some risk of requiring remedial services; and 28 percent are at low risk.
While those statistics seem daunting, Linn said she was not alarmed, coming off of summer break.
“If these numbers are the same at the end of a school year, then yes, we’ve got problems,” she said. “But many kids don’t pick up a book over the summer.”
Title I funds also are used to pay for the district’s summer school with the purpose of helping those behind in their studies to catch up.
Last summer 130 elementary students were deemed in need of summer school. Attendance averaged 55-80 students. Attendance is not mandatory.
The district is in its second year of a new language arts curriculum and in the first year of new assessments to measure student progress.
“So next year we’ll be able to see if we need to tweak either the curriculum or teaching methods to yield better results,” she said. “Or we may discover significant progress, reinforcing we’re doing things right.”
Each elementary principal oversees the Title I program in his or her school. Altogether there are six Title I teachers and four paraprofessionals trained to implement the federally funded program.
In just the last couple of years the program has been expanded to go up to fifth grade. It previously concentrated on primarily children in kindergarten up through third grade.
Its funding has been cut every year for the past several years. Also meant to enhance Title I was the Kansas Reading Initiative, a pet project of Gov. Sam Brownback’s to instill strong reading skills.
Originally, districts were to receive five years of funding for the Lexia Learning program. After one year of the program, funding is now available for only another year, said Jack Koehn, USD 257 superintendent of schools.
Each grade level has certain criteria students are tested on at the beginning of the year. Kindergarteners, for example, are expected to know 29 letters of the alphabet.
“They go from learning their letters, to sounding out words to reading words,” said Lori Maxwell, principal at Jefferson Elementary. Of Jefferson’s 200 first- and second-grade students, 41 receive Title I services.
If a student struggles with a certain concept, he or she is paired with a Title I teacher or para to receive extra help.
Sometimes that help occurs right in the classroom, other times groups of five or six students receive 30 minutes of instruction every day.
With so many students in need of this special instruction, the group sessions are tightly orchestrated throughout the day.
The value of the Title I program is to catch a student’s stumbling blocks early before they become lifelong problems, Linn said.
“As you identify the gaps in a child’s learning process, Title I helps plug those holes. It helps us identify what skills they are missing.”
IN OTHER business, board member Dan Willis told of the search for a new director of the ANW Cooperative, which oversees special education services for eight school districts.
Because of the tight market for school administrators, Willis expressed concern of having a deep pool of candidates from which to choose.
Currently, 12 Kansas school districts are looking for superintendents, with 30 to 50 positions expected to open up in the next year, Koehn said.
Willis said at a recent job fair at Emporia State University, only 50 candidates appeared compared to a more typical number of 200 or more. And at a University of Kansas job fair for educators, “more administrators than applicants showed up,” he said.
USD 257 faces the same dim prospects for new teachers, Koehn said. “We’re expecting 30 teachers to retire in the next year, with another 50 stepping down in just a few years down the road. That’s why we need to do everything we can to make our pay and benefits packages as attractive as possible.”
TONY LEAVITT, school board president, said those interested in seeing a career and technical education program implemented in the region met recently.
Yet to be measured is student interest in such a curriculum, Leavitt said, and is next on organizers’ agenda.
Big questions about the viability of such a program exist including who the major funders would be. It is hoped community colleges also get on board with the program’s implementation.
Even so, the majority of board members were enthusiastic about the program’s prospects and what it could mean to area students.
Learning skills such as welding, plumbing, and how to operate sophisticated machinery “better equips our children for the future,” said Willis. “It would give them the skills to earn a good living.”
Leavitt saw the program as providing ready recruits for prospective industries. “By having an employable workforce gives the county a better chance of attracting an industry this way.”
AFTER an executive session board members announced the acceptance of the resignation of Chris Weide as assistant track coach at Iola High School.
