031505 Work Session attachment 1

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• OCS: If a student at [X School] is not on grade level, the school has Exceptional Children services, including Reading Recovery and Reading Resource. Per school board policy, a success plan is developed for children not on level. Parents, teachers and administration work together to look at areas of need and strength. The meeting can serve as a wake -up call for parents. Teachers are very proac ti ve and work early to deal with po ten tial re ten Lion studen ts. • CHCCS: Literacy Collaborative is a district -wide balanced literacy program. It's a fantastic model, the District saying "here's what it will look like" is agift to teachers. There area lot of collaborating teachers who go into the regular literacy classrooms. One CHCCS school is looking for funding to extend the program to 3- 5grades A two to two and half hour block daily. As Table 15 indicates in OCS schools students are more evenly distributed between Level III and IV reading levels, with 41.3% of students at Level III and 46.3% at Level IV Exceptions are noted at Grady Brown (32.4/58.2), Hillsborough (29.5/62.7), Pathways (34.7/54.7), and Central (49.3/29.1). But in CHCCS, 66.9% of students move up to Level IV while approximately 26.38% remain at Level III This distribution applies across the district, with Glenwood and Seawell at the high end, 214/75.1 and 23/74.7 respectively, and Frank Porter Graham dipping to 31/60.8 and Carrboro to 27.6/62.1. The difference in the distributions of Level III readers and Level IV readers between the two districts is sustained in middle school and may provide the foundation for the differences in achievement in middle school and high school. CHCCS As a district CHCCS lists 45.5 reading specialists. Each elementary school has between 2.5 and 5 reading specialists, with an average of 3.9 across nine schools. Reading Recovery teachers (trained in a special strategy to work with struggling readers) work with all first grade classes in the district. Literacy Collaborative specialists are working with every school's 2nd grade classes. Elementary school principals have high praise for the Literacy Collaborative Project which has placed two specialists in every elementary school. These specialists teach demonstration lessons in the second grade. The importance of their presence in classrooms cannot be overstated. Even when teachers receive training for a curriculum innovation that they deem relevant and important to their children, integrating that new way of doing things into their classrooms may be difficult to accomplish and sustain. We know that the sustained demonstration of a new practice within the context of instruction is critically important to its adoption and continuing implementation. Each middle school has two reading specialists and each high school one. CHCCS /OCS Final Report 49