LPOSD adopts new K-6 curriculum

PONDERAY — The English Language Arts curriculum on the elementary level was last updated 12 years ago in the Lake Pend Oreille School District.

After Idaho content standards changed in 2011, the district worked to update materials, said Andra Murray, LPOSD director of Teaching and Learning, during Tuesday's board meeting.

"But we are fairly significantly out of date in terms of elementary reading," Murray said. "Staff were surveyed last spring and they did indicate English Language Arts as the highest priority area of need."

For that reason, Murray researched four different ELA curriculums and for the past year, 21 teachers pilot tested the ReadyGEN literacy program for grades K-6. Murray, along with district instructional coach Natassia Hamer, collected evidence of the program's success, which they presented to the board on Tuesday, requesting permission from trustees to adopt ReadyGEN for implementation in the 2018-2019 school year. 

With the Scott Foresman curriculum currently used by the district, Hamer said students are reading texts that, with the new standards, are up to two years below grade level. With the new curriculum, students read more complex texts, she said, as well as read fiction and nonfiction 50-50.

"Not only are students reading complex texts, that's fiction and nonfiction, we're having them dive into the text and pull evidence from the text," Hamer said. "So their thinking and learning doesn't come from me standing up here and telling them about volcanos, it's from reading complex texts about volcanoes and proving their information through text."

While this is one of several "key shifts," Hamer said, another important aspect is academic vocabulary and building vocabulary that transfers between ELA and math.

Several teachers who participated in the pilot were present at the board meeting to testify to the success they experienced with their students.

"We were very excited, along with our students, to hold in our hands an authentic text that students might see in a bookstore or check out of a library," said Jennifer Cornelius, a fourth-grade teacher at Sagle Elementary. "We also as teachers were very excited when students were coming to the end of a text and they would say, 'What do we get to read next?'"

Each teacher in turn described different aspects of the curriculum that appealed to them, including assessments of skills, such as grammar and comprehension, as well as the writing that goes with each lesson each day, how the curriculum allows kids at different reading levels to participate in discussions, and how it integrates reading and writing with other courses, such as science.

ReadyGEN is a 2016 curriculum written from the ground up, Murray said.

"That was important to us," she said. "They didn't take an already existing program and shuffle it around to match these new Idaho content standards."  

This year's budget for the district included $100,000 of supplemental levy funds for curriculum adoption and professional development in anticipation of the purchase. While Murray did not receive her original request to the board during supplemental levy presentations in November of $300,000 for adoption of new curriculum, she assured trustees on Tuesday that a full K-6 curriculum could be adopted within budget. Murray said a portion of the technology budget can be used to help with licensing the program, and she also secured some outside funding through Panhandle Alliance for Education.

Board members unanimously approved the request, and Murray said she will order the full curriculum next week and it will be ready for teachers in four to six weeks.

Mary Malone can be reached by email at mmalone@bonnercountydailybee.com and follow her on Twitter @MaryDailyBee.