New education concepts
By AMY HANSEN CNA staff reporter ahansen@crestonnews.com
MOUNT AYR — While attending a national conference in Salt Lake City this semester, Mount Ayr Elementary Title I reading and math teacher Valle Smith noticed that Iowa schools were on track as the leaders of the pack in education.
Representatives from three southwest Iowa schools, Mount Ayr, Central Decatur and Red Oak, traveled to the conference for the program Response to Intervention (RTI). Four representatives went from Mount Ayr School District.
“RTI is a way of addressing student needs in the classroom,” Smith said. “In general education, it’s reteaching by using different instructional strategies, giving kids more to learn the skills and concepts before they falter to the point before we have to consider special education. Really, it’s a matter of time and different instructional strategies and technologies.”
Tier system
The RTI program at Mount Ayr is based on three tiers. The first tier is primary prevention, which is the general education setting with school and classwide research-based instruction. This tier identifies suspected at-risk students.
“You hope that 80 percent are mastering the material,” Smith said. “But, as we all know, there are kids that learn in different ways and need more time.”
The second tier is secondary prevention, an intensified, validated intervention or tutoring. Schools often provide this in smaller groups.
Smith said this tier is for some special education students, but mostly encompasses Title I. She believes time is the key factor to close the gap between the proficient and non-proficient students.
The last tier is tertiary prevention and is primarily special education. This tier is to help the most struggling learner and students with a sustained lack of progress with the previous tiers. There are individualized and instructional education programs for the third tier.
Smith said the school was already doing a lot of this before the conference, such as schoolwide screenings with the phonological awareness test in the fall.
Mount Ayr also has a computerized tracking system that stores student information in a database and gives reports on grade levels and percentages of students who are passing.
“Data-based decision making is what makes Mount Ayr ahead of the game,” Smith said.
New ideas
One significant change that emerged from the conference was to include the special education and Title I teachers in weekly meetings with the regular grade-level teachers.
“Even though we felt like we were good at communication, it was done verbally and briefly in the hallways,” said first-grade teacher Cindy Allen.
Allen said these meetings are 30 minutes long with everybody at a table going over issues and documentation.
“It has really opened up communication lines even more,” she said.
Smith agreed on the benefits of inclusive meetings to discuss the areas students struggle in and data evidence.
“We do what we need to do to help these kids, and we go from there,” Smith said.
