Clark County School District

The following schools in Clark County will be served by the Reading First grant:

* Edwards Elementary * Griffith Elementary * Harmon Elementary * Hinman Elementary * Moore Elementary * Reed Elementary * Rundle Elementary * Hal Smith Elementary * Vegas Verdes Elementary * Wasden Elementary *

Demographics:

The Clark County School District (CCSD) encompasses the urban area of Las Vegas and surrounding rural communities. With 266 schools, 244,684 students, and 14,000 teachers, it is the sixth largest district in the country. CCSD is clustered into five geographic regions, each with its own Region Superintendent. CCSD is one of the fastest growing public school districts in the nation. Increasingly, the student population is becoming more diverse in its composition. The student population is .9% American Indian, 6.6% Asian, 28.8% Hispanic, 13.8% African American, and 49.9% Caucasian. The majority of students come from middle and lower-middle income families, many of who work in the service side of the entertainment industry. Student enrollment has increased approximately six percent each year for the past five years. To support this growing population, the district is projected to open 88 new schools over a ten-year period. Six elementary schools and two middle schools were opened during the 2002-03 school year. The district structure is both centralized and de-centralized. The K-5 Curriculum Essentials Framework, textbook adoption process, and testing are centralized. Site-based management empowers administrators and school staff members at each site to select from the districtÂ’s list of adopted curricula and determine how they will use them to attend specifically to the needs of the school population. Staff can also select replacement units and supplemental materials to augment instruction. District focus on balanced and effective instruction serves reform well, and plans to improve instruction are meaningful.

Schools to be served:

The Southern Nevada Reading First Consortium Advisory Committee has decided to target Reading First funds in schools that receive little to no funding for early literacy and have a significant number/percentage of students scoring in the bottom quartile on standardized tests. This application will use the Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS) from October 2002 as the basis for school selection as well as the Target Area Survey 2004, which was created in February 2003 and establishes the free/reduced lunch rates for the 2003-04 school year. The Consortium currently serves 10 schools in order to sufficiently fund each school for a comprehensive literacy program including professional development and classroom materials. The majority of these schools have at least 40% of their population qualifying for free/reduced lunch, at least 30% of their students scoring in the bottom quartile on the ITBS, receive no Title I or NREA funding, and have high minority populations. In addition, the schools (see list in Appendix A) are located in the five different regions that make up the Clark County School District.

Commitment to Essential Elements and Time for Literacy Instruction:

The instructional program for each Reading First school is designed around the essential components of reading instruction, as identified by both the Report of the National Reading Panel and Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children. Supported by a scientifically based research rationale, described below, each program selected is uniquely positioned to address the reading difficulties commonly experienced by at-risk readers.

• Phonemic Awareness. Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate individual sounds, or phonemes, in spoken words (Center for the Improvement of Early Reading Achievement [CIERA], 2001). Correlational studies have identified phonemic awareness and letter knowledge as the two best school-entry predictors of how well children will learn to read during the first two years of instruction.
• Phonics and Spelling. Phonics helps children learn the relationships between the letters of written language and the sounds of spoken language. Programs of phonics instruction are most effective when they are systematic and explicit (CIERA, 2001). Marilyn AdamsÂ’s comprehensive review of decades of early reading research found that teaching phonics accelerates literacy acquisition, thus making it an important intervention for early at-risk readers (1990). Similarly, the National Reading Panel found that systematic phonics instruction had significant effects in the early grades, indicating that such programs should be implemented in both kindergarten and first grade. While researchers disagree on the exact length of time phonics instruction should occur, or the single best sequence of phonics activities, systematic phonics instruction is essential to developing skilled readers (NRP, 2000). Additionally, the practice of encouraging children to spell words as they sound (sometimes called invented or temporary spelling) has been shown to improve phonemic awareness and to accelerate their acquisition of conventional spelling when it is taught in first grade and up. Children's independent spellings yield direct evidence of their level of phonological sensitivity and orthographic knowledge, enabling the knowledgeable teacher to tailor instruction and respond to individual difficulties. (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998)
• Fluency. Reading with children fosters childrenÂ’s development of fluency, the ability to read a text accurately and quickly (CIERA, 2001). Fluency and automaticity are the goals of advancing decoding abilities, including phonemic awareness, sequential decoding, recognition of word patterns, and word recognition. Even readers who have good word identification and decoding abilities cannot comprehend text easily without adequate fluency (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 2001). When word identification is fast and accurate, the reader can more effectively think about the meaning of the text (Moats, 1999). Keith StanovichÂ’s new research, Progress in Understanding Reading: Scientific Foundations and New Frontiers (2000) indicates that good readers use context to monitor comprehension, while poor readers use it for word recognition.
• Vocabulary. Reading to children provides many opportunities to build comprehension through concept development and building understanding of word meanings. Beginning readers use their oral vocabulary to make sense of the words they see in print. While some comprehension of passages is possible, even when a few of the words are unknown to the reader (National Research Council, 1998), readers must know what most of the words mean before they can understand what they are reading (CIERA, 2001).
• Comprehension. As the purpose for reading, text comprehension is an active process that requires an intentional and thoughtful interaction between the reader and the text (CIERA, 2001; NRP, 2000). Instruction in reading comprehension strategies is essential in ensuring the transition from beginning to skillful reading proficiency (Snow, Burns & Griffin, 2001). When used appropriately, comprehension techniques improve recall, question answering and formation, and summarization.
• Writing. In order for children to be truly literate, they must be fluent readers and writers. Students, whether emergent/early or transitional/fluent, must be engaged in the writing process daily. The teacher must directly teach the writing process, which includes: prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing. The research of Donald Graves and Lucy Calkins demonstrates how even our youngest writers work through a process that corresponds to the cycle of craft professionals follow. The writing process and analytic writing traits are best taught using a combination, based on the level of writers in the classroom, of the following four instructional approaches: modeled, shared/interactive, guided, and independent writing. Constructive, helpful suggestions regarding student writing from the teacher and peers must be provided whether in individual conferences, small groups and/or in the whole group.

In K-3 classrooms, teachers will use developmentally appropriate techniques to guide students through the phases of reading (Brown, 2000). During the kindergarten and first grade years, teachers will use read-aloud, shared reading, language experience, and dictated stories to develop students’ concepts of print. Songs, cheerleading, chants, and rhymes will be used to develop phonemic awareness. Once equipped with the proper tools, all teachers will create imaginative, versatile, and engaging literacy environments for students that are conducive to promoting consistency across grade levels. As students become phonologically aware, they will use prior knowledge and phonetic signals to recognize, use, and decode simple spelling patterns. The relationship among the reading, writing, and spelling components of literacy will be emphasized by the teacher so that students see the connection among these elements and find a purpose in their learning. Seeing this interrelatedness of the six dimensions of reading will motivate students to apply their new knowledge, skills, and strategies. Teachers who know how to develop more advanced levels of phonological awareness, such as deletion and segmentation, will support students who are ready to “go for fluency”. More complex spelling patterns will be learned, including words with phonograms, suffixes, and prefixes. Teachers will further develop students’ abilities to use chunking as a decoding strategy as well. Fluency increases as teachers assist students in the coordination of comprehension strategies and decoding. Additional classroom changes will be seen in the increase in student responsibility for learning. Initially, teacher support will be at its highest level, especially in the early grades. As students progress as readers and writers, knowledgeable teachers can decrease the amounts and kinds of support so that students experience success independently, thus achieving the goal of reading by the end of the third grade. See Appendix O for each site’s Reading First plan.

 

Instructional Activities:

Explicit and systematic instructional strategies. The CCSD K-5 Curriculum Essentials Framework for Literacy, the instructional base of this Reading First initiative, and supplemental materials will be used as a means of providing effective instruction during each Reading First schoolÂ’s uninterrupted reading block of at least 90 minutes. Fast paced, strategic lessons with appropriate pacing that utilize flexible grouping, varied instructional formats, and scientifically based strategies will be used to ensure student success. Teachers will minimize teacher talk to encourage and increase student interaction and opportunities for student demonstration of learned concepts. Ongoing assessment will identify the need for immediate and intensive intervention to be provided one-on-one and in small groups using existing intervention models, Project LIFE and Project STARS. Most importantly, the instructional strategies used in Reading First schools will be grounded in SBRR and the five essential elements of reading. This focus on SBRR will allow the needs of all students to be met, and will help them reach the level of proficiency designated for their grade levels. These strategies, combined with the ongoing classroom-based and progress monitoring assessments later, will ensure that students reading below grade level will be continually monitored and no child will slip through the cracks. See Appendix N for a description of sample explicit and systematic strategies that will be featured in our core program.