Curriculum Improvements

2017-18

During the 2017-18 school year, the District Advisory Committee met four times. Three of those meetings were dedicated to the review of the K-12 Language Arts curriculum. In November, our K-4 Language Arts facilitators Teresa Langton and Ashlee Emmerich presented information on our Elementary Language Arts curriculum. Currently the K-4 school uses Houghton Mifflin’s Journeys program. They indicated that it was time to begin a formal review of curriculum programs which will be completed during the 2018-19 school year. Ms. Heidi O’Donnell presented information to the committee regarding the state of our 5-8 curriculum. This review showed that our Language Arts program in grades 5 and 6 are attempting to follow the balanced literacy approach. These grades have been building up classroom libraries for several years and are utilizing that for the balanced literacy approach. The seventh and eighth grades are following a more traditional approach to Language Arts and focus on fiction. Finally, Mr. Dan Mathieson informed the committee of the 9-12 Language Arts program. The primary focus of the high school stresses fiction as well, however, they have implemented more non-fiction than in the previous report to the committee.

Upon analysis of our achievement gap during the past five to six years, we noticed that the our reading SPED to regular education gap was the largest in 2017-18 as it has ever been. Therefore, this is where we spent many of our resources for the 2018-19 school year. The district purchased a reading intervention program targeting our seventh through tenth grade students. Over the past couple of years we had invested in hiring an interventionist through an ADSIS grant from the Minnesota Department of Education. That teacher was relocated to our new 4-6 building. This left a bit of a hole which was filled by purchasing a research based curriculum. The district will be monitoring the progress of students through the program as well as track evidence on the MCA results.