Guiding Questions

• What actions were successfully implemented?
• What impact was observed (or not)? What evidence did you use to determine impact?
• How did actions impact disproportionality and/or engagement with families of disproportionally impacted population?
• What actions would you continue? What actions would you change? Why?

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• We successfully implemented a number of action plans to facilitate our work with and support of our students as readers. Much of this involved training and support that was built through our PD sessions for the school year.
• We coordinated professional development and support of our teachers in partnership with i-Ready trainers who visited our building. This focused training and support led to use of i-Ready tools to inform small group and individualized instruction of students as well as data conversations with students to set goals regarding instructional minutes, lessons successfully completed, and targeted benchmarks through use of the i-Ready diagnostic.
• Really Great Reading was utilized as part of our Success Block implementation in order to support students demonstrating gaps in foundational reading skills, particularly as identified through use of the Words Their Way inventory.
• An important component of our High Leverage Instructional Practices in use in our classrooms, we developed a school-wide focus on building academic vocabulary and background knowledge.
• The ongoing work of our MTSS Team (which met weekly), as well as ongoing Data Team meetings provided ongoing support for individual classroom teachers in determining ongoing instructional steps designed to move student learning forward towards success.
• Our MTSS Team continued to strengthen and develop its practice, reviewing building-wide student data on a weekly basis, identifying and targeting specific students based on demonstrated need, and coordinating with the classroom teacher as well as special services, Title/LAP, MLL representatives and/or our school counselor to develop supports specifically designed for identified students according to their individual needs.
• Grade level teams collaborated in their use of i-Ready and Words Their Way data to group and support students for interventions.
• Our Newcastle Instructional Coach mentored individual teachers, modeled specific skills, and worked alongside teachers as a way of modeling, and then handing off the responsibility for practice implementation, while also continuing to monitor and provide feedback regarding that implementation.
• Recovery services were successfully provided for students as needed.
• In response to our i-Ready professional development, staff shared with colleagues regarding data analysis and grouping strategies implemented in their classrooms. These conversations often led to additional changes and implementation throughout portions of our grade level teams as new ideas and strategies were generated. Our Spring i-Ready data showed 70% of our students testing at the level of Proficiency, and 89% Approaching or Above in reading.
• Grade level teams, as well as members of our MTSS team, observed a positive impact on students supported through our use of i-Ready data, as these students demonstrated increasing success in the strategies and skills being supported.
• Implementation of Success Blocks mid-year resulted in increasing numbers of students being able to successfully access phonics instruction appropriate to their individual needs. Additionally, these students were supported through guided reading groups focusing on these needs in addition to comprehension strategies as needed.
• Teachers demonstrated increased familiarity and use of strategies for building academic vocabulary and background knowledge in their instruction, as well as through their collegial conversations and planning in small groups and professional learning opportunities.
• Our MTSS data team observed the impact of our interventions on students identified as at risk through additional data collection and feedback from classroom teachers.
• Throughout the time of COVID protocols and beyond, we worked closely with families to check in and support students regarding attendance. This involved primarily our counselor, dean of students and principal connecting through phone calls, home visits, and, at times, provision of transportation. Through this level of support, we were able to maintain a 95% overall attendance rate. Our Students with Disabilities attended at this same 95% level, and our ELL and Low-Income students were slightly lower at 91% and 90%.
• In response to our weekly MTSS team data review, we focused additional interventions and supports on the needs of identified students. Many of these students were representative of our MLL, SPED, and Low-Income populations. Beyond our academic strategies, additional support for these students included building connections and making contacts with family members by our counselor, PBSES coach, dean of students, MLL and LRC1 teachers, and principal. We worked to ensure that each family had the needed technology, including laptops in hot-spots for internet connectivity.
• Our use of Success Blocks and small group interventions has provided meaningful opportunities to engage striving students in meaningful learning opportunities. We are continuing these practices this year, and believe that being able to implement from the first weeks of school will greatly benefit all of our students.
• i-Ready data continues to be used at all grade levels, including kindergarten, where students who scored at higher levels also received Fountas and Pinnell assessments to determine specific student need for those advanced learners.
• We were able to move quickly this year with implementation of the Words Their Way Spelling Inventory to assess student progress and implement word study at all grade levels. Our grade level leads received support from our building TOSA and shared this learning with each grade level team. Data gathered by teachers was entered into shared documents that allowed our teachers to have collaborative conversations regarding student progress and growth.

Describe your SIP team process for studying the SIP data dashboard and other available data and selecting SIP goals.

Our preliminary data review began with our Tier 1 Leadership Team in August, prior to the return of staff for the new school year. We began with an introduction of the ISD Data Protocol tool for leaders to use with their grade-level teams in the examination of data throughout the school year. Our team then reviewed our school data dashboard, including SBA, i-Ready, Phonics, WSIF, and Attendance data for 2021 and 2022.

This same protocol and student data were then reviewed with our entire staff during our August professional development sessions. In addition, we worked to familiarize our building team with grade level curriculum scope and sequence and curriculum maps utilizing the interactive link now provided in Staff Hub. With feedback from our leadership team, we determined that our focus should be on reading, and we determined our goals to target improvement and disproportionality. The leadership team continued to provide guidance and feedback for development of our SIP content, which was finalized and shared with our building staff in addition to parents serving on our Site Council team in January.

Describe your observations regarding overall achievement and disproportionality that informed your SIP goal(s) and actions.

In reviewing our achievement and disproportionality data, our leadership team identified that students receiving ELL services, IEP services, or were identified as Low Income demonstrated more struggle with achievement than the other constituents of our student community. Our team also noted that while, overall, our ELL students demonstrated struggle with reading proficiency, our Hispanic/Latinx students demonstrated a higher level of reading growth on the i-Ready diagnostic than other students, with 80.9% demonstrating anticipated Typical Reading Growth.

As we considered the variables that might contribute to this disproportionality, we identified increased diversity in our student population. Over the past three years, Newcastle’s Low-Income population has nearly doubled, from 7% to 13%. While our ELL population has remained fairly stable at 14%, the percentage of our students of color has increased from 57% to 65% over this same period of time. With increasing numbers of students enrolling at Newcastle from increasingly diverse backgrounds and experiences, it is incumbent upon our staff at Newcastle to be responsive in our support for the unique student and family needs present in our community. We believe the disproportionality gap experienced by our ELL students in English Language Arts can be directly attributed to the limited English they have been exposed to in their countries of origin. Our goal is to immerse these students in language-rich environments as early as possible to support them in their transition towards multiple language learning.

As we embrace this rich layer to our community, we have also seen an increase in students requiring special education services. Our FTE designated for this population has increased from 1.5 to 2.0 between the 21-22 and 22-23 school years. During these two years, we have acquired two special education instructors entirely new to our community. With this change, we have worked to embrace an increasingly inclusive approach to student instruction for these impacted students.

School-Wide Achievement Goal(s)

By the spring of 2024, Newcastle students meeting proficiency on the SBA Reading Assessment will increase from our current 70% to 80%.

Disproportionality Goal(s)

Students receiving MLL and Special Education services will demonstrate gap-closing growth each year of this SIP as indicated by 60% of identified students being on track to meet or exceed stretch growth on i-Ready Reading.

Action: Professional Development Support for Reading Instruction

 

Implementation

• Coordination and delivery of professional development alongside i-Ready representatives to support teachers in use of i-Ready tools to not only identify appropriate student placement for small group instruction, but also strategies for addressing the specific skills requiring support.

 

Impact: Evidence / Monitoring

• Use of small groups in classrooms in response to i-Ready data and monitoring ongoing performance of students through i-Ready diagnostics, including both Typical and Stretch Growth.

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Action: Use of My Path for i-Ready Reading

 

Implementation

• Students are provided opportunities throughout the school day to access My Path for i-Ready reading.

 

Impact: Evidence / Monitoring

• Monitoring ongoing performance of students through i-Ready diagnostics, including both Typical and Stretch Growth.

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Action: Reading Small Groups Designed in response to i-Ready Reading data.

 

Implementation

• Teachers will use i-Ready data and guidance to inform their small group placement and instruction.

 

Impact: Evidence / Monitoring

• Monitoring ongoing performance of students through i-Ready diagnostics, including both Typical and Stretch Growth.

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Action: Kindergarten Participation in Fall i-Ready Diagnostic

 

Implementation

• Reading/Phonics Groups in response to i-Ready results.

• Paraprofessional support for pull-out groups designed in response to this data.

 

Impact: Evidence / Monitoring

• WaKIDS Data

• RAN (Rapid Automatized Naming)

• Ongoing i-Ready Data

• Fountas & Pinnell Scores

• Teacher Conferring Notes

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Action: Build on PBSES Previous Systems to Support Transition

 

Implementation

• Review building-wide expectations with staff and students at start of school year and following extended breaks.

• Review use of SWIS data system.

• Provide monthly assemblies in alignment with building expectations and SEL focus for the month.

• Engage in and review CR-TFI with staff.

 

Impact: Evidence / Monitoring

• Monitoring ongoing academic performance of students through i-Ready, Fountas & Pinnell, and SBA (in response to successful behavioral supports).

• Monitoring ongoing changes present in our SWIS data throughout the year.

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Action: Goal Setting by Teachers in Alignment with SIP

 

Implementation

• Classroom teachers will set Student Growth Goals in alignment with our reading goals for the 22-23 school year using i-Ready, Fountas and Pinnell, and additional data of each teacher’s choosing.

 

Impact: Evidence / Monitoring

• Monitoring student progress in each of these assessments/diagnostics across the school year.

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Action: Intentional and Coordinated Literacy Intervention

 

Implementation

• Through use of our Title/LAP teacher, classroom teachers, and Success Blocks, we will provide a coordinated building-wide intervention program for students.

 

Impact: Evidence / Monitoring

• Monitoring student progress through i-Ready, Really Great Reading, and Fountas and Pinnell assessments throughout the school year.

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Action: Use of Technology and Accessibility Features

 

Implementation

• At multiple grade levels, teachers are accessing core technology tools and their accessibility features such as Microsoft Reading Progress (similar to a digital F&P that is available on an ongoing basis) and provides a read-aloud feature for striving students as well as our MLL students as needed.

 

Impact: Evidence / Monitoring

• Ongoing Data gathered from Microsoft Reading Progress

• Monthly Fluency checks using this same data

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Action: Use of a Variety of Technology Tools to Support Individualized Reading

 

Implementation

• Tools such as PebbleGo, TrueFlix, Sora, Learning Ally, Actively Learn, and KCLS access.

 

Impact: Evidence / Monitoring

• Tracking systems built into applications

• Monitoring of levels selected for use by students

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Action: Equity Events: Reading Without Walls

 

Implementation

• Annual celebration and focus on diverse book titles and authors

• Personalized for each student (for example, students get a Bingo Sheet and they can choose how they want to grow as a diverse reader)

• Challenges students to read beyond their comfort zone

• Reading List provided to staff and students, in terms of suggested book titles

• Librarian highlights diverse books through Book Talks and ongoing library shelf-top displays

 

Impact: Evidence / Monitoring

Students who complete the challenge have their name displayed on a “Reading without Walls” school-wide bulletin board

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Action: Hour of Code

 

Implementation

• Brings tech into hands of all students, Grades K-5

• Non-computer, as well as computer-based activities

• Students work in teams to solve coding challenges

 

Impact: Evidence / Monitoring

Students are able to independently, or with a partner, solve future coding challenges on their own

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Optional additional explanation/rationale/research

While we would like to acknowledge that we have continued work to do in the area of literacy, which has been our SIP focus for the last 3-plus years, we have strategies and practices in place that align our academic practices in this area with our MTSS structure. We feel confident with the Tier 1 practices (diagnostic assessments, progress monitoring, Success Blocks) we have in place and that when we are then looking at students for potential Tier 2 support through our Tier 2 Team, we have multiple pieces of data and strategies that help inform our thinking in terms of “next steps”. We feel that with these structures and strategies in place, our literacy scores will continue to increase over time, including real progress for our students with gap-closing goals.

When looking at math, we do not have these same structures and strategies in place, hence the shift of focus to math for this SIP cycle. We currently use a whole class lesson instructional model and do not have a consistent practice of small group and additional interventions in place. We have i-Ready that helps to inform our instruction. The i-Ready Math assessment is given three times a year but unlike reading/literacy, we do not use the data in the same way and in alignment with our MTSS structure. When we look at students who struggle in math, we do not have as many data points nor do we have as many strategies and built-in structures of support.

Our district scores indicate that our students, as a cohort, have lost more ground in math than in any other academic, post-pandemic.

Results for students who took the test in spring 2022—the first main National Assessment of Educational Progress administration for these grades since the pandemic began—show the biggest drop in math performance in 4th and 8th grades since the testing program began in 1990. (Education Weekly, 10/24/22)

“The results show the profound toll on student learning during the pandemic, as the size and scope of the declines are the largest ever in mathematics,” said National Center for Education Statistics commissioner Peggy G. Carr in a press release announcing the report.

The steepest declines were found in 8th grade math, both nationally and in the Northwest. In Washington, students scored 10 points lower. (U.S. Department of Education, Nation’s Report Card)

Rationale to change our SIP focus from literacy to math would be that we currently have district-mandated practices in place for literacy (dyslexia law, SLPs, LAP, Success Blocks, newly adopted Benchmark Phonics at the Kindergarten Level, Really Great Reading and the data-driven process to qualify, Words Their Way, etc.) as well as robust interventions for Tier 2 and anticipate an increase in our SBA Literacy scores due to these adopted practices. We currently lack this depth of practice, as well as student-centered strategies for our struggling mathematicians and would advocate that with increased focus on strong instructional practice and MTSS-aligned strategies, we can work to close the gap for our most struggling students and increase math scores for all students.