A summer literacy program started in 2019 in St. Vrain Valley schools will continue this year and will expand across the state thanks in part to a new COVID-19-related grant program.
St. Vrain Valley School District received $2.79 million from Colorado’s Response, Innovation, and Student Equity, or RISE, Fund for the development of Reading ReLaunch Across Colorado, a full-time summer literacy program for students in kindergarten through fifth grades at schools with lower performance in the Cheraw, Estes Park, Las Animas, Montezuma-Cortez and Sheridan school districts.
The funding, announced Monday, is part of the second round of grants awarded by the RISE Fund, which was launched in September and distributed its first awards in November. In all, grants awarded through RISE total more than $40 million, according to the governor’s office.
In addition to expanding the program across the state, the RISE grant will pay for St. Vrain’s Project Launch summer program at six of 14 district sites, Kerri McDermid, the district’s chief communications and global impact officer, said in an email.
In Project Launch’s pilot year in 2019, 1,947 students received four full-days of instruction for the month of June. Those students’ mornings were spent on direct reading instruction and their days were rounded out with math, STEM and elective instruction in the afternoons to keep them motivated and engaged when applying some of the skills learned earlier in the day, said Jackie Kapushion, SVVSD deputy superintendent.
The program featured a student-teacher ratio of 12-to-1, which will be duplicated in the statewide partnership.
The Reading ReLaunch partnership also will employ the Orton-Gillingham Approach and the Wilson Fundations literacy program, both used in Project Launch. The former is the methodology for instruction, while the latter is the curriculum model, said Diane Lauer, SVVSD assistant superintendent of Priority Programs and Academic Support. Kapushion said they complement each other to offer a “multisensory” approach to help students engage with the English language. Lessons include phonics, word work and language development using materials such as letter tiles, whiteboards and picture cards.
Reading ReLaunch also will take a page from SVVSD’s book and “help to build a new teacher talent pipeline that more closely matches each community’s student population,” McDermid said in her email. “The model for this approach was developed in St. Vrain, where its Pathways to Teaching (P-TEACH) program offers students the opportunity to earn 31 credits toward a bachelor’s degree in education (all free of charge to the student), including 21 credit hours in education-major coursework. The program has been highly successful, including a first-year P-TEACH graduating class of 29, 74% of whom are bilingual/bicultural and 94% of whom are continuing postsecondary coursework in education.”
Twenty-five to 30 students from the partner districts will be paid a minimum of $12 an hour to work in small groups with Reading ReLaunch students and assist in lesson planning and data analysis, McDermid said. Focus will be specifically given to bilingual/bicultural, first-generation high schoolers.
St. Vrain’s P-TEACH program currently offers seven courses in partnership with University of Colorado Denver and another three with Front Range Community College, Lauer said. Reading ReLaunch districts also can elect to partner with CU Denver to provide their students with three semester credit hours while working in Reading ReLaunch.
Those high school apprentices will support small group instruction, giving them a view into the world of teaching as well as a bit of summer salary while also giving master teachers a set of helping hands, Kapushion said.
All of the program elements will ensure “a strong focus on student-focused learning,” McDermid said.
That focus was successful in St. Vrain, where Project Launch has netted positive results, Lauer said. The district saw statistically significant growth in phones/phonemic awareness and decoding among students that participated in the summer program and a mid-year check-in December found they were able to keep and build on those gains when compared to previous years’ growth, she said.
The goal is to expand those outcomes to all of the state partners and also to allow partners to learn from each other.
“We were really looking for partners that represented different corners of Colorado,” Lauer said, adding that participating districts range from urban to rural, large to small, mountain to plains. The diversity allows participants to “experience a bit of each other’s communities and worlds,” she said.
Kapushion added, “any time our teachers can collaborate outside of our system, they gain new perspective and are able to bring new strategies and practices back to the classroom. The answers for student growth and achievement lie within … Teachers are masterful and committed to their practice. When you bring a group of teachers together, magic happens.”
The partnership earned high praise from Gov. Jared Polis, who, in a news release stated, “I am thrilled to see such an excellent idea from St. Vrain Valley School District. We know that education is deeply rooted in the community and it’s important that we support collaborative efforts such as this to promote literacy across our state throughout the summer months.”
Lauer noted that the I in RISE stands for innovation, which was the basis for Project Launch and now Reading ReLaunch.
Project Launch was created after St. Vrain Superintendent Don Haddad started working with district staff on ways to extend the school year and make time more variable and not so tied to the school year, Kapushion said, adding the best way to prevent “summer slide” — the loss of learning experienced over summer vacation — is to have students not take a break for two or three months.
This summer, the district and its Reading ReLaunch partners also will be able to capitalize on lessons learned during the coronavirus pandemic.
As the district had to switch from in-person learning to remote instruction and then to a hybrid model and back to in-person instruction again, it tapped into a lot of innovation, technology and resilience, Kapushion said. “We’re looking to build on that,” she said.
“We believe that our students may not have gained the same kind of traditional instruction had they been in school consistently, but they also gained a lot,” Kapushion said.
Lauer said prior to last year, the district didn’t have an iPad for every student but this year all students have technology in their hands, allowing them to engage in learning beyond class time. The same goes for teachers, who prior to this year did not participate remotely in professional development. Previously, training was all face to face, she said.
Getting tech into the hands of students and teachers makes a program like Reading ReLaunch possible, Lauer said. All of the partners can collaborate virtually and take the tools, technology and knowledge gained from the experience of the past year and “innovate and go forward,” she said.
