With the school year just beginning, childhood literacy in Bozeman Schools remains a top priority.
The Bozeman School District tests students at each grade level between kindergarten and second grade to ensure their reading skills are on track. Third grade is the pivotal year of reading where a child goes from learning to read to reading to learn.
The district has daily programs to always help assist with these learning curves, such as a walk-to-read embedded within the school day. This allows students to walk to a teacher who is teaching the skill level they require or a reading interventionist.
If a student is not hitting this benchmark, the district uses a Multi-tier System of Support, otherwise known as MTSS, where learning teams are meeting regularly and analyzing student data. The Bozeman School District's Megan Roth says these teams within are designing interventions for students to catch them up, or extensions if they’ve already learned what is required.
"So we use what's called a Multi-tier System of Support, MTSS for short, which is a process in which professional learning groups, learning teams, are meeting regularly, at least once a week, if not twice, and analyzing student data. Then based on that data, designing interventions to catch them up or extensions if they've already learned what we want them to learn," says Roth. "So we would implement an intervention or extension and then progress monitor or do an assessment at the end of that and then start that cycle again to make sure they're making progress towards our target."
Roth says last year, children who weren’t meeting this third-grade benchmark were not completely uncommon. Around 120 third graders were not meeting this benchmark, which is around 25% of third graders across the district.
