Students in the St. Albert Protestant school system will get a more balanced approach to literacy this year thanks to cash from the province.
The district announced last week that it would put $284,000 into a three-year literacy strategy to help teachers teach kids to read and write.
Literacy is a vital life skill and a key determinant of high-school completion, said superintendent Barry Wowk.
"There's so much research out there that shows it's important at all grade levels," he said.
This cash will give all elementary and junior high school teachers the skills needed to spot and help struggling readers, he said.
Most of the cash for the program comes from the province. Last October Premier Alison Redford and Education Minister Thomas Lukaszuk restored about $107 million in funding that the province had cut from the education budget earlier in 2011. The Protestant board got about $1 million as a result, Wowk said.
About $700,000 of the extra money was earmarked for wages while the rest — about $324,000 — was meant for classroom and community support. The board raised that to $484,000 with cash from its reserves. The board is funding the literacy program from that money and putting $200,000 toward towards training high school teachers and supporting students with severe disabilities, Wowk said.
Trustee Cheryl Dumont praised the literacy initiative, saying it would help many students.
"We're always wanting to create master teachers, and I think this is where it starts," she said.
Teaching teachers
The literacy strategy is based on an instructional approach called Balanced Literacy, explained Sherri Fricker, a teacher who taught and used it in the district about 10 years ago.
"We know that not all children in a class are at the same level," she said, yet teachers teach as if they were — having everyone read the same book, for example.
"If you just throw Shakespeare at kids and hope they learn, what they're going to learn is that reading is saying a list of words," she said — they won't enjoy or understand it.
Balanced Literacy has teachers tweak their lessons to fit each student's skill level, she explained. Under Balanced Literacy, instead of reading the same book, students will read books simple enough for them to understand, letting them build their comprehension skills. With writing, instead of saying, "copy this sentence," teachers will verbally walk students through the thought processes behind it.
"The teacher gives them just enough support to be successful," Fricker said.
The program was very popular when it was taught in the district about 10 years ago, Wowk said, and many teachers are still using its techniques. The district only had the money to teach it once, though, and many of the teachers who took the training have since left. This new cash will give all teachers a chance to take this training during the next three years.
The cash will also create a standardized test that teachers will use to detect the literacy levels of all their students so they can tailor their lessons to them.
"Sometimes students read well enough that it's hard to tell that they don't understand the whole meaning," Wowk said.
Many students can read well enough to squeak through the lower grades, Dumont said, but falter in the higher ones due to poor comprehension skills.
"I really think this program has the ability to help a lot of kids who we don't know are having trouble until it's too late," she said, and should also help more students finish high school.
Balanced Literacy training is set to start this June.
