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Plymouth-Canton highlights early literacy gains after three-year UFLI rollout
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Summary
Elementary curriculum lead Jan Douglas told the board that structured literacy (UFLI) plus Collaborative Classroom instruction is in year three of implementation and that mid-year DIBELS benchmarks show fewer students needing intensive support; the district will continue focusing on special education groups and fidelity of implementation.
Jan Douglas, the district’s elementary curriculum coordinator, told the Plymouth‑Canton Community Schools Board of Education that the district has completed three years of UFLI Foundations implementation and two years of Collaborative Classroom language-comprehension work, and is seeing encouraging assessment trends.
“We are in year 3 of UFLI implementation and year 2 of Collaborative Classroom,” Douglas said, adding that adherence to UFLI’s scope and sequence is essential to produce reliable growth. Douglas said teachers received two-day trainings, job-embedded coaching, and weekly progress monitoring to align instruction to student needs.
Douglas described the district’s shift to DIBELS 8 as a benchmark instrument with multiple brief subtests and said the DIBELS oral reading fluency subtest and other diagnostics allow teachers to target instruction. “When students take the DIBELS 8 benchmark, if they score at or below the fortieth percentile they receive additional diagnostics,” she said.
Douglas presented midyear trend data showing a decline in the number of students in the intensive-support range on the DIBELS oral reading fluency measure and said, taking all students into account, roughly 5% of students remained in the at‑risk or intensive-support range for that subtest. She emphasized that fidelity to the program matters: “If you stick to the scope and sequence and the methodology outlined in UFLI, then 95 percent of students can be successful in learning to read without additional support,” Douglas said.
Board members pressed for clarification about slides and labels and asked for disaggregated demographic data. Douglas said data by demographic groups and building-level reports will be available at the spring data presentation (end-of-year reports), and that special education remains a priority for targeted improvement. She also noted the district is expanding morphology instruction in middle school and supporting high‑school teachers with targeted professional learning for older students who missed earlier foundational work.
Douglas described short weekly progress-monitoring checks (encoding/spelling probes of a few items) and DIBELS subtests that typically take one to three minutes, and said those measures are supplemented by observational and coaching data. The presentation concluded with board members asking administrators to update presentation slides to make the meaning of “at risk” and percentages clearer for public consumption.
The district said administrators will continue classroom learning walks, coach-teacher cycles and monitoring to maintain fidelity and to ensure targeted supports for students who still need intervention. The board asked for the spring disaggregated data set when it becomes available.
