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Parishes report early gains, phased rollout of Heggerty phonemic-awareness lessons
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Summary
Three parish representatives told the Early Childhood Advisory Council that Heggerty, an 8'12-minute daily phonemic-awareness program, has been adopted across pilot sites with early positive feedback from teachers and families and measurable gains on DIBELS in one parish.
Three local school-system leaders told the Louisiana Department of Education's Early Childhood Care and Education Advisory Council in November that a phased rollout of the Heggerty early-language program is gaining traction in parish classrooms and early data show improvements in phonemic-awareness measures.
Emmy Thibodeau, director of Early Childhood for Lafayette Parish School System, told the council Lafayette began using Heggerty in preschool classrooms in the 2023'24 school year and that teachers "adopted it very quickly." She described Heggerty as a short, repetitive tool that provides an "8 to 12 minute daily instruction" routine and said Lafayette is using coaches, pacing guidance and data monitoring to scale the program across 65 early-learning centers and more than 400 classrooms.
"We service about an average of 16,000 young children under the age of 5 in Lafayette Parish," Thibodeau said, underscoring the size of the district'level effort and its family-engagement work in parks and libraries.
Amanda Colon, program facilitator for early learning programs in Ascension Parish, said her system ran a voluntary pilot in which five of 27 sites opted in. Colon described supports for participating teachers including monthly "coffee conversations" for professional learning and said the pilot will collect pretest and post-pilot phonemic-awareness data that sites can use to publicize outcomes and support enrollment.
"We asked who wanted to participate," Colon said. "So 5 out of 27, I felt good about." She emphasized that supports and shared learning were key to avoiding the sense that teachers were "in that bubble" alone when trying a new curriculum.
Pointe Coupee Parish, which the supervisor said is in its fourth year of Heggerty implementation, reported measurable assessment gains. Amanda Fontenot, early childhood supervisor and Head Start director, said: "Our DIBELS data has skyrocketed. So we ended last school year with 63 percent of our pre-K 4 year olds being kindergarten ready." She added that, accounting for summer mobility, 56 percent of those children remained kindergarten-ready at the start of kindergarten.
Presenters and department staff addressed inclusion and accommodations: teachers shortened lessons, broke instruction into smaller groups, and used companion video resources to adapt the program for children with communication needs. Department staff said they would gather best practices from early implementations and produce guidance and resources for statewide distribution.
The council received the presentation as informational; no formal action was taken. Presenters and staff said next steps include phased expansion, continued coaching and data-driven monitoring, and shared professional learning opportunities for teachers across participating parishes.
