St. Louis Park staff report deeper use of ‘care team’ cycles to advance culturally relevant literacy

At the St. Louis Park School Board’s June 24 meeting, the district’s data lead outlined a year-end review showing wider and deeper use of the district’s collaborative “care team” cycles to develop culturally relevant literacy across grade levels.

Dr. Becca Saar, identified in the meeting as the district’s data scientist and title coordinator, told the board care teams worked through a semester-long cycle of vision-setting, data review, hypothesis formation, classroom implementation, data collection and reflection. “The idea is that they’re changing their own teaching practices as they move forward,” Saar said.

The report said care teams used a five‑pursuits framework adapted from Dr. Gholdy Muhammad — skills, identity, intellectualism, criticality and joy — to shape curriculum and measure outcomes. Saar said early childhood teams concentrated on identity work, including staff reflection and family engagement; elementary teams emphasized literacy skills with structured small-group interventions and progress monitoring; middle school teams focused on student-to-student talk and engagement strategies; and high school teams wrote unit learning goals and course overviews explicitly tied to the five pursuits.

Saar described data collection methods that included documented research questions, implementation notes and reflections. She said she surveyed 39 staff and requested care-team documentation from buildings to form the report. Examples cited in the presentation included a Peter Hobart fifth-grade math intervention where 83% of focal students of color moved at least three levels in a MathFactLab fluency measure after targeted interventions, and an elementary team that reframed instruction to honor African American English while teaching phonemic segmentation.

Board members asked whether common measures across teams would improve comparability; Saar replied there are trade-offs. Having multiple teams use the same metric can accelerate building-level expertise, she said, while some teams choose specialized measures (for example, math fluency) when that aligns with their students’ needs.

Saar listed strengths and areas for improvement. What’s working, she said, includes collaboration time, coaching support and the use of data to guide instruction. Challenges included requests for more collaborative time, clearer expectations for documentation, more coaching and help using data, and the workload associated with the process.

The district will start changing its coaching and content‑lead models next year, and the board signaled interest in improving cross‑site sharing so successful strategies can be adopted across elementary, middle and high school levels.

Board members thanked staff for the presentation and said they appreciated the concrete examples and the district’s move toward deeper, more consistent implementation of the care‑team cycles.