Effective Schools

At the West Chezzetcook site of Lakeview Consolidated Elementary space is at a premium but there is always room for reading.

The tiny school, where the gymnasium daily converts to the music room and the staff can’t all squeeze into the lunch room, fits in ways to help its youngest students develop reading skills that will shape the rest of their lives.

Tightly tied to the communities it serves, Lakeview - with students divided between a Primary and grade one building in West Chezzetcook and a larger building for the upper grades in Porter’s Lake - was accustomed to receiving support from parents and few, if any, tough questions about how students were being taught. The close knit staff was happy to bob along on the current of good will, says Principal Robert Spicer.

Or at least that was the case until a few years back when an unexpected call came from the school board’s Program Department. Principal Spicer and the staff at Lakeview received the difficult news that their gem of a school could use a little polish.

Literacy outcomes for lower elementary age students were not up to par. In the fall of 2006, 30 per cent of children in grade one were below expectations for reading.

It was unwelcome information that could have sunken the morale of Lakeview staff, or damaged the close relationships between home and school.

But, as Spicer tells it, staff at Lakeview quickly determined that knowing where they were was the first step in getting to where they - and their students - needed to be. Together, with support from the board, they resolved that they would raise the bar on reading in their school.

“Fortunately, our entire teaching staff embraced the need for the change that was necessary,” Spicer says.

Since that time the school has made remarkable strides. Every year, more and more children are becoming better readers and the gap between the reading abilities of students has narrowed.

School board reading assessments for grade 2 illustrate just how far students at Lakeview have come. In 2004, less than 60 per cent were meeting expectations, but results have steadily improved with nearly 80 per cent meeting expectations in 2008.

The first step was gathering more baseline information about the reading and writing abilities of Lakeview’s students. The data helped teachers determine where to target teaching efforts.

“We knew we had to do something different and quickly,” says literacy coach Peggy Jackson, who divides her time between helping teachers hone their classroom practice and working one on one with grade one students in the Reading Recovery program.

In her tiny room, she sees four children a day for 30 minutes each, helping them advance their reading skills, improve their word knowledge and enhance their writing abilities.

“It’s a very focused program and you really tailor it to every child,” she says. “Each child that comes in here I may be doing something different.”

One child, for example, came to her with no desire to even look at books for fear that he would get the words wrong. Now he is an engaged young reader, eager to share his successes and move on to new, more advanced books.

The addition of a literacy coach, a bigger budget to buy a collection of just-right leveled reading texts, the allocation of additional substitute days to give teachers time to collaborate, and a cadre of dedicated parent volunteers have together helped Lakeview’s students make big gains.

Parent volunteer Terra Hudson comes to Lakeview twice a week to spend time reading with the children. “They come out, I read a book with them, and check every word that they read correctly.”

Jackson says watching children come to see themselves as readers, eagerly sharing the contents of their books, makes her job worthwhile.