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Springfield Township SD to post K–5 ELA course overviews after year‑two CKLA review
Summary
At its March 9 Academic Affairs meeting the committee agreed to post K–5 English language arts course overviews rooted in CKLA year‑two implementation; administrators said the overviews explain the program’s two‑strand design, time allocations, and grade‑level learning goals for families.
The Academic Affairs Committee on March 9 approved posting K–5 English language arts course overviews to the district website after hearing elementary leaders describe year‑two implementation of the CKLA program.
Assistant Superintendent Damen Johnston told the committee the overviews will “post on the website for public viewing around what's happening in each of our grades at English language arts,” and that the guides are intended to make school practices more visible to families and staff.
Elementary presenters described CKLA’s two strands: one focused on phonics and decoding skills and the other on building background knowledge. “There are these two broken strands where one is really focusing on skills where we're explicitly teaching phonics skills … and then the other strand … the knowledge strand,” Dr. Markle said, explaining how K–2 separates dedicated skills and knowledge blocks and how the strands converge in grades 3–5.
Administrators said the program design calls for significant daily blocks of instruction. For K–2, the program recommends 120 minutes of direct instruction plus an additional 30 minutes for small‑group reading and intervention; third grade is also planned for 120 minutes, with fourth and fifth planned for roughly 90 minutes. Mr. Spiker said that in third through fifth grades “those two strands they come together” and instruction increasingly emphasizes independent reading and connected writing tasks.
A parent on the committee, Katie, described CKLA as “totally awesome,” and members discussed how the district reallocated a little time from early math, science and social studies at K–2 to accommodate the expanded ELA block while noting overlap between knowledge‑based ELA content and those subjects.
The overviews will be used in transition events and posted publicly so families can see the district’s grade‑level expectations and instructional focus. The committee agreed to the posting during the meeting; no formal dissent was recorded.
Next steps: the district will publish the six course overviews and continue classroom planning and PLC work linked to CKLA implementation.
