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District details K–12 literacy overhaul and new curriculum partnerships
Summary
District curriculum leaders presented a K–12 literacy plan that expands daily phonemic instruction in K–2, extends the Foundations program to grade 3, purchases decodable texts for early grades, rolls out Patterns of Power grammar instruction in middle grades, and partners with CPET to develop K–5 literacy units and common writing assessments.
Suzanne Carroll, the district's literacy director, told the Board that the district is pushing toward a vertically aligned K–12 literacy program with new benchmarks, instructional materials and data tools. "Heggerty, which is our phonemic awareness curriculum that was implemented in kindergarten last year is now being implemented in grades K, 1 and 2," Carroll said, adding that Foundations (a structured-literacy phonics program) has been extended to grade 3 and that students receive daily focused instruction.
Carroll cited early results from the first Heggerty cohort: "At the beginning of the year when they were given their phonemic awareness baseline...26% of those children were already proficient in five key areas of phonemic awareness," and she said 79% entered 1st grade as proficient or developing. To support instruction, the district purchased collections of decodable texts for grades K–3 and provided professional development to help teachers use those texts alongside broader classroom libraries.
Margaret Croninger, director of humanities, described grammar and assessment work at the secondary level and a new partnership with the Center for Professional Education of Teachers (CPET) at Columbia University. "CPET ... are going to be writing literacy units for us in K–5," Croninger said, and the units will include common writing assessments. The district is also piloting the Patterns of Power grammar program in grades 3–8, with short daily sentence-study lessons designed to strengthen students' sentence-level reading and writing skills.
District staff emphasized teacher professional development and coaching as central to the plan. Carroll and Croninger said teachers have taken part in summer curriculum work, in-school intervisitation, case-study PD where teachers present students for collaborative problem solving, and multiple rounds of half-day PD this fall. The district has created a literacy leadership team made up of K–5 teachers from each school to support consistent implementation and teacher-to-teacher coaching.
On assessment and data, presenters said the district is expanding single reading benchmarks into broader literacy benchmarks (phonological awareness, spelling, high-frequency words, and writing expectations) and is evaluating new data platforms to create a districtwide data portal. Croninger described second-year use of Newsela mini-benchmarks for middle grades and said teams used a protocol to examine student results and plan small-group instruction.
Staff also described efforts to ensure access and equity: the district plans to integrate media-literacy instruction across grades, pursue micro-credential and leadership opportunities for veteran teachers, and phase in supports and common writing measures so that progress can be tracked across grades. The superintendent and curriculum staff emphasized that many changes are classroom-level and require additional coaching time and data tools before the district will consider any formal expansion of coaching days.
Board members pressed on implementation details—including reference materials for Patterns of Power, how to differentiate PD for veteran and novice teachers, and how the district will identify and provide accelerated instruction for students who exceed benchmarks. District staff said they will pursue micro-credentials, station-rotation PD, intervisitation, and a data warehousing solution tied to PSAT administrations to provide richer cross-disciplinary literacy data.
The district said these items are being incorporated into budget planning for the 2024–25 year; staff flagged that some elements (notably expanded coaching time or days out of classroom for onboarding) will require trade-offs and budget decisions in next year's process.
The presentation closed with an invitation to return with more detail on the Civic Readiness Seal implementation and the CPET unit work. The board took no formal vote on curricular adoption at this meeting; the work was presented for information and early direction.
