Antigo schools report winter benchmark results, outline Act 20 reading plans and interventions

Unified School District of Antigo administrators reported winter benchmark assessment results to the school board and described how they implemented Act 20 literacy screening, individualized reading plans and targeted interventions across the district.

District administrator Ms. Stutzring said the winter administration was the district’s first use of AIMSweb Plus under Act 20 and that the new multi-step screening produced more detailed diagnostic data than the FastBridge system the district has used previously. “We have 81 students across our district. We have 22 below identified below grade level,” Stutzring said when summarizing the 4K results, and she explained the AIMSweb process and follow-up steps for students who fall below the screening threshold: “If they fell below the 20 fifth percentile, then we had to move on to step 2 of the Act 20 plan.”

Why it matters: district leaders said the AIMSweb Plus screeners plus the additional diagnostic subtests allow teachers to pinpoint specific deficits (for example nonsense-word decoding or phoneme segmentation) and place students into targeted small groups or more intensive tier-3 interventions. Those targeted supports are the basis for the individualized reading plans the district must produce under Act 20.

Key findings and immediate steps

- Screening and reading plans: Stutzring told the board that kindergarten had 44 reading plans written and that the district has 82 reading plans in total (district total reported during the presentation). She described reading plans as multi-page documents that include goals, progress monitoring and home support activities and said plans were sent to parents with an acknowledgement form.

- 4K and…