Dunwoody principal highlights UFLI reading intervention and school data showing grade-level gains

Dunwoody Elementary principal Elise Bosco and staff demonstrated the district27s new reading intervention, UFLI (University of Florida Literacy Institute), and presented interim progress data showing student gains on screening measures.

Bosco introduced interventionists and three third-graders who participated in a brief portion of a UFLI lesson used in small-group and whole-group instruction. Missy White, a teaching-and-learning strategist who supports literacy, said the UFLI program is "designed for teachers, by teachers" and emphasized its systematic, sequential approach to phonemic awareness, decoding and spelling.

School leaders described implementation details and initial outcome measures. Dunwoody reported 29 Tier‑2 literacy intervention groups (28 using UFLI and one using a comprehension resource) serving K–3 students, and 21 students on personal reading plans; five students had met personal-reading-plan goals and 12 students had met intervention exit criteria at the time of the presentation. Bosco said the school aims for 80 percent of students to reach their typical growth score on the I‑Ready reading measure and that, as of January, about 70 percent of students had made at least 50 percent of their expected growth toward that goal.

Dunwoody also described schoolwide systems tied to literacy and social-emotional learning: regular data retreats, progress‑monitoring meetings every 6–8 weeks, personal reading plans, and PBIS-based behavior tracking. Bosco noted teacher and staff climate improvements, citing a 46-percentage-point increase in a staff climate question and a 38-point increase among teachers on the Panorama survey compared with previous results.

The presentation concluded with discussion of classroom walkthroughs, use of accountable‑talk stems to increase student discourse, and plans to continue coaching and district-level rollout of curriculum changes.