Kerr staff eye myriad ways to improve math, reading

Increasing student proficiency was the core focus for LC Kerr’s 2024-25 school improvement plan which was green-lighted by the Clinton City Board of Education recently.

LC Kerr staff presented the plan during last week’s Board of Education meeting, where talks covered much the same as Clinton High and Sampson Middle School improvement plans in December,with expectations centered on improving students proficiency in reading and math.

“Our mission is to educate all students to their highest level of academic performance, to support them socially and emotionally, and to prepare them to become productive and contributing members of a modern society,”stressed Kerr Principal Greg Dirks during the meeting. “By 2026, Clinton City Schools will be the premier learning community in the southeast — improving the world one Dark Horse at a time.”

That statement on mission and vision was recited prior to the discussions, with Dirk noting that the statement was the guide for crafting the improvement indicators.

LC Kerr’s plan was broken down into goal areas each consisting of data and key action items set to achieve desired proficiency in a specific goal area.

The first of those items was centered around meeting or exceeding state expectations in reading through mClass. To achieve that, Kerr staff noted it would, “contribute to the success and overall growth of all students in reading by evaluating student data collected through mClass and LETRS” during the beginning, middle and end of year assessments to reduce the number of non-proficient students throughout the school year.

mClass is a digital assessment system that measures student reading and math skills, with LETRS being a teaching too that helps children develop writing, spelling and oral language skills.

Kerr’s data was showcase on a color scale of red, yellow and green/blue, representing lowest to highest level proficiency. The schools intended expectations are to take the mClass beginning of the year numbers Red (67 percent), Yellow (20 percent) and Green/Blue (13 percent) and improve the mClass end of year proficiency numbers to Red (15 percent), Yellow (10 percent) and Green/Blue (75 percent).

While there was myriad planned approaches to achieve those goals, the key focus was strengthened efforts towards data-driven instruction and targeted interventions.

“We have quite a few actions that we’re taking to ensure this happens, and I’d just like to highlight a few of those,” Kerr teacher Sandra Cannady said. “Of course, we’re doing the mClass data talks. We’re also doing burst classroom intervention which is part of our mClass that we’re using in small group time. That helps us group the students and know exactly, through the data, what areas we really need to be focusing on.”

Cannady said implementation of mClass is conducted in all classrooms with emphasis on continuity.

“We follow the development of students through progress monitoring,” Cannady explained. “We have a progress monitoring calendar that we all use to ensure that teachers are progress monitoring at the same time. Through this, we all know when it’s time to focus on the red students, the yellows and when it’s time to do the greens and the blues, so we keep that fidelity going as that happens.”

Another big push towards achieving reading goals was establishing stronger involvement with parents. Through the family engagement committee and the curriculum engagement team, Cannady said LC Kerr has organized different curriculum nights aimed at assisting parents in helping their child improve reading skills at home.

“We’ve had a Spanish parent night, a Pre-K parent night, and, just recently, we had one for kindergarten,” she said. “When we had the one for kindergarten, we were able to give the parents the middle of the year assessment reports for their children. By inviting them into the schools, we were able to go through all of the stuff we think as normal, like when we talk about LNF, letter naming fluency, and PSF (Professional Standards Framework).”

She continued, “That’s just part of our language at this early level, but we were able to go through each one of those things with the parent as they held their report for their child. We went through it, explaining what was going on, where their child ranked. Then we also supplied them with activities, so that they could use those to help improve their child’s reading at home while we are rigorously doing it at school.”

Cannady also said the introduction of a fairly new program called Heggerty was being used as an action item to reach set goals.

“Heggerty is something kind of new to all of us this year,” she said. “It’s a program that goes through all the essential parts of early literacy for the children, such as sounding out words and blending words together so we’re implementing it as well.”

Those applied actions were showing signs of success evident through LC Kerr’s current middle of the year data, with students now at 34 percent Red, 19 percent Yellow and 47 percent Green/Blue.

“I’m proud of our students, teachers and IAs (instructional assistant) for all their work and the actions that they’re doing,” err Guidance Counselor Blair Colglazier said. “We’re hoping to stay on this same good track to reach our trajectory for meeting our E.O.Y. (end of year) expectation.”

Goal Area 2 consisted of math, which proposed the same proficiency approach as reading but with a focus on —”evaluating student data collected through iReady during (beginning, middle and end of year) assessments to reduce the number of non-proficient students throughout the school year.”

iReady is an online program that aids teachers in personalized instruction for students through diagnostic assessment, such as adjusting question difficulty per student need, personalized instruction, via tailoring lesson to each student and to track student progress.

“To do that, teachers are collaborating to determine what math strategies will be most effective and meet the needs of all our students,” LC Kerr teacher Casey Avery said. “We use our iReady data to do that and we use our iReady platform to help us group students and figure out what interventions we need to use.”

From iReady data beginning of the year math data showed 200/213 students were at an emerging kindergarten level and 13/213 were at early to mid kindergarten level. The goal for end of year math expectations are to have 39 students at an emerging kindergarten level and 196 at mid/late kindergarten level.

Avery covered a list of their action items to reach that goal, and involving parents was also a key factor.

“All data collected during M.O.Y.(middle of year) assessment will be compared and evaluated with end of year assessments,” Avery said. “The number of students proficient in math is evident through these benchmark assessments. We also use a reading night, we have a math night as well, where we bring our parents in and give them strategies to use at home.”

Middle of the year iReady data revealed 152 students were currently at emerging level and 66 were at early to mid level. Per the projected middle of the year expectations, the targeted mid/late level was 119 students which was not met.

“As you see, we did not meet that goal, but we feel that that is because of the way iReady math works,” LC Kerr teacher Ellen Wiley said. “They test on all of the skills for the whole year, and obviously, kindergarten students are not taught all the skills by the middle of the year.”

An inquiry came from board as to why the test was given when students haven’t learned all the material. The answer — it was a state requirement.

The final component of Kerr’s student improvement plan was Goal Area 3, Pre-K family engagement — a joint effort the schools aim to foster by working in tandem with parents to increase literacy skills in their child’s primary years.

“To show a little bit of how Pre-K kind of helps build a foundation,” Kerr teacher Suzanne Rice said, “we work to meet these goals through the implementation of our curriculum, which is Teaching Strategies (TS) Gold. It supports whole child development and aligns with our Clinton City Schools core infrastructional framework.

“Our teachers make every effort to continuously support whole child development, which includes reading, math, all of it, and the relationship that we’ve built with our families,” she added. “We really believe that helps our students the most.”

Rice also covered some of the tools they use to build towards those goals to conclude the schools presentation.

“Additionally, we incorporate science of reading practices into our daily instruction, routines and activities,” she said. “These practices align with our TS Gold curriculum, N.C. foundations for early learning, and our newly acquired Heggerty kindergarten curriculum. We utilize all these tools together in the classroom and believe this helps support the foundational skills necessary to help students become proficient readers throughout their academic career.”

She continued, “Lastly, in Pre-K, we are preparing for our ECERS visit which is slated to take place next year. ECERS is our Early Childhood Environmental Rating Scale, and covers all areas of learning and development within the classroom environment. Our Pre-K teachers work diligently to maintain high quality learning environment at all times, and are utilizing this year to make sure all of our newly hired teachers and assistants, have a clear understanding of this tool, thank you.”

To view a full breakdown of LC Kerr’s school improvement plan visit Clinton City Schools web page www.go.boarddocs.com/nc/clintoncs/Board.nsf/public .