“Ask this: What is your intervention plan for the lower-quartile students - the bottom of the class? And how are you progressing with that plan? Even if your kids are not in the lowest quartile, this matters to you. If the school has a solid plan for hard-to-teach kids, they are likely to have a solid plan for your kid, too.”

Very true, and unfortunately, the administrators and above levels have much difficulty answering the above question, or questions like it. They avoid it at all possible costs, and the media needs to be that much more savvy, especially the ones who know a thing or two on numbers and means. ”

As those who are regulars know,my company has been working hard with DSBN for 5 years now.We standardized reading intervention for LD children,did a lot of early reading intervention and through an analysis of schools that were struggling immensely we have done whole class reading instruction/spelling in multisensory explicit systematic synthetic phonemic instruction and phonics in several Grade 1 classrooms.
This year,the Grade 3 results vaulted 21% for English Language learners.
This board does as Malkin suggested above,“what can we do for our community of strugglers at an early stage to get better results?”

Jo-Anne,

I would be interested to know what type of criteria you and your team used to assess whether or not a school was struggling. What data came into play here?

Interested…

Stephen,it is Carol Germyn at DSBN,Superintendent of Student Services who makes those appraisals with her team.
I`m sure they would be happy to tell you-My tests are the IOTA,the Crests ,Standford,all for analysis by teachers while serving the child`s file that goes into the program but this board does their own analysis using their own tools to decide which schools are most needy of the program.
We have a Train the Trainer team in that board at this point,speech pathologists that train the teachers and do the assessments required by the board and MOE.

Thanks Joanne.

So, is your organization doing the initial training with staff?

Yes,and there is a year to get to Train the Trainer-2 day training for a group of teachers and the chosen Train the Trainers must do the intervention with 2 kids to the half way mark,48 lessons so they are “operational” and not just theoretical.There is a certification exam for the trainers.After,the board owns the expertise and sails along independently.