A huge thank-you to all of the classroom teachers, special education teachers, reading specialists and reading assistantants for the hard work that you have been doing in conferencing with students and assigning them power goals within School Pace. Students are making reading progress! The School Pace Data Tool allows for us to compare the number of emergency readers that we had at each grade level last year in April of 2016 when we first started the ARC program to right now--December 20th, 2017. The data sets are shown in the table below. You will notice that it isn't even April yet and we have less students at every grade level who are scoring in the emergency range and more students scoring in the Proficient or Above Level Range at just about every grade level than we did in April of last year. Perhaps, most significant is the fact that last April we had 300 students scoring below level in the emergency range on the IRLA and right now in December we have 158 students scoring in the Emergency Range. Likewise, last April we had a total of 569 students scoring at the Proficient or Above Level range and right now in December, we have 639 students scoring in this range. This is fantastic as it is only December and we have shown this much growth! I cannot wait to see all the progress that the students will make by April of this year! Your efforts are appreciated! Continue to encourage your students with their reading efforts and goals!

Take time over the break to enjoy time with your family and friends!

Once again, the Reading Specialists and Assistants will be assessing students using the "Assessment Team" approach to do the DIBELS' Next Asssessments. They will begin the assessments starting on January 3rd at HCB and continue to Doe Run. They anticipate having all assessments complete by January 9th. Boost Groups will not meet on Jnauary 2nd as Reading Specialists and Assistants will be preparing materals for assessments. Boost Time will resume again on January 16th. Groups may be somewhat different depending on the testing results. Changes will be communicated to the classroom teachers by the Reading Specialists.

An additonal reminder regardng the Writing Samples is that you can give the prompt to your students any time during the month. All prompts should be scored by January 31st and scores need to be recorded on the Google Doc. You can access the Google Doc using the link below. Please remember that we are not assigning half-points and no child should recive a score of .5 in any category. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.