Rome City School District principal highlights UPK gains, sets targets to reduce spring regression

Principal Molly Biddick presented a progress report on the Rome City School District's Universal Pre-K (UPK) program, saying the district currently supports 206 UPK students across 13 sections (including two special-education sections) and is at capacity with a waiting list for 2025—6. She framed UPK as a structured, play-based, whole-child program focused on early literacy, social-emotional learning and family partnerships.

Biddick described the district's use of Teaching Strategies Gold to assess students at three checkpoints and said the district's 3-year-old classrooms showed notable gains: "We had a 40 to 60% increase in meeting or exceeding expectations, with over 93% meeting or exceeding by the spring in every single one of those domains," she told the board. She said below-expectation rates dropped by more than 50% across domains and cited the highest gains in literacy, math and social-emotional learning.

For 4-year-olds, Biddick said growth was evident from fall to spring but that the district saw a spring regression in literacy and math that she linked to the end-of-year activities and program wind-down. "We've realized that, you know, you get to April, May, June, there's a lot of things happening in UPK," she said, and proposed targeted strategies such as family workshops and spiral review units to sustain gains.

Biddick described behavior and wellness work tied to the Pyramid Model, noting that staff training and a clearer understanding of behavior-incident reporting led to more consistent reporting. She told the board that behavior-incident reports rose from 77 in the fall to 300 in the winter as staff learned to use the tool and the district paired reporting with tiered supports including school psychologists and counselors.

On attendance, Biddick said UPK tracks absences closely and intervenes before students miss 10 days; she reported parent-transport attendance figures presented to the board as "91.36%, 89.57% and 89.335." She emphasized that those figures refer to parent-transported students rather than bused students.

To address the spring regression, Biddick proposed several action steps: build focused April To June academic units with spiral review in math and literacy, expand tier-2 small-group interventions, continue professional learning on data practices, and increase family engagement strategies. She set near-term goals the board can monitor, including aiming for at least 75% of UPK students to meet or exceed literacy and math expectations by the spring 2026 checkpoint and targeting a 10% reduction in students scoring below expectations in social-emotional and literacy domains by winter.

Biddick also reviewed program-quality work: the district completed 127 walkthroughs and used ECERS and other environment indicators; Quality Stars had previously rated the program a 3 and the district is striving for a 4 or 5. She said a January state review prompted a visit by the director of the Office of Early Learning, who visited UPK classrooms to observe practice and "see it firsthand," an outcome Biddick said reflected positively on staff and community partnerships.

Board members thanked Biddick and asked clarifying questions about how behavior reports are communicated to families; Biddick described a team approach involving the classroom teacher, school team members and family engagement to identify supports. The board did not take action during the presentation but discussed monitoring implementation and the proposed targets going into the 2025—6 school year.

The district will revisit these targets and interventions as part of regular monitoring and professional-development work in the coming months.