Adolescent Literacy: What One Middle School is Doing

By Les Potter, Principal, Silver Sands Middle School

All schools are feeling the pinch of standardized testing and student accountability. At Silver Sands Middle School, we are trying to approach student achievement through literacy. If students can't read and understand the material, they won't be as successful on the test as they could be, but besides the test, we also want students to do well in school and in life, and reading is the key to success.

Silver Sands is a well-established, middle-class school of approximately 1,300 students in grades 6-8, located in east central Florida. Our state is very rigorous with its requirements for measuring school success through student achievement on the FCAT, or Florida Comprehensive Achievement Test. Schools which make or exceed expectations (A and B schools) get cash rewards of approximately $100 per student (for us, $130,000). If you are a failing school for two years in a row, you can have your school taken over by the state. Besides evaluating school success, additional pressure is placed on the students. In tenth grade students take the FCAT for graduation purposes. If they pass the test and meet all other graduation requirements, they will receive their diplomas. If they fail the FCAT, they may retake it several more times, but they must pass it to graduate. You can well imagine the stress that this test puts on students of all ages.

We believe that we have to prepare our students to successfully pass this test as best we can. Currently, the FCAT is composed of reading and math sections. Our school district requires all middle school students to take language arts, reading, and math in each of their three years. This is certainly a help in test preparation, but Silver Sands is also approaching literacy improvement by a variety of methods working with students and faculty. We believe in using a "shotgun" approach as we try to do the most we can with as much as we have through many academic avenues.

The first step is to create a vision that reading is important to student success and that reading is to be taught by all teachers — not just language arts teachers. The second step was to meet with our faculty, school improvement council, and central office staff to discuss the myriad issues surrounding adolescent literacy. We even met with all our students in assemblies to establish a climate for student achievement. The third step was resources: time, people, and money.

Last year we received a FlaRE (Florida literacy) grant for money to pay for in-service training. This in-service was used to teach all of our teachers (or at least to remind them) how to work on reading with their students. We created a Literacy Council that meets about once a month to discuss ideas, issues, and concerns. One of the issues we discussed was the need for a reading coach. We are not a Title One school, so we do not get federal dollars to help with our needs. I was able to reduce a choral unit by half (due to dropping student enrollment) and hire a half-time reading coach who works with our teachers following up with our in-service programs. She has been invaluable to keep all teachers focused on reading.

The district has also allowed us to hire a full-time intensive reading teacher. This teacher works with students who need extra help through software programs, having them read aloud to her, in small group instruction, and silent reading. Students meet with her every day for a full class period instead of an elective class for a semester or a year, depending on the student. We have identified literacy-challenged students and have had the good luck to have reading teachers who would volunteer to have a first period reading class for slower readers in smaller classes. This has helped a number of students in this program. We also have a drop-out prevention teacher, who is a certified and experienced reading teacher, to work in small self-contained classes with students who don't do well in the regular school setting. Students seems to enjoy the smaller classes where they can work at their own pace with a teacher to monitor their progress.

As do most schools, we have tutoring available for students. We have tried many different approaches to tutoring — after school, of course, but also Saturdays both on the school campus and in a recreation center near where a number of our students live, before school, and even during school hours. During school, we pay teachers to give up their planning period for a semester to work with students during the student lunch time, and have even gone so far as to remove students from PE for a quarter at a time to get them back on grade level. We use money from our FCAT reward to pay the teachers.

We also dedicated 10 minutes each day to free reading time each morning before first period officially begins. I was able to remove a minute or so from classes, locker time, and other areas in the schedule to make this part of the school day. Every student and adult is supposed to read for pleasure a book or magazine of choice. Last year for about a month we purchased books for teachers to read aloud to their classes. Students seemed to enjoy the change of pace and we hope that this will also encourage reading.

In May of last year, we even held a Literacy Fair on a Sunday. We invited parents, students, and media to help celebrate literacy. The teachers and students spent several weeks in preparing a program to express themselves via literacy. We had student-made posters, student-led activities, storytelling by students, games, food, etc. Although we had a reasonably good turnout, we are going to try this event again on a school night and see if we do even better.

Since we have been an A school for a number of years, we have used our FCAT reward money on literacy: hardware, software, reading, textbooks, and in-service activities. We use our staff and school improvement council to determine what our needs are for literacy that year and spend the money accordingly. We also encourage teachers to apply for grants for classroom literacy issues. So far this year we have had 13 teachers apply for grants. We have been fortunate that our varied approaches seem to work well for the great number of students with literacy issues. We believe there is no one simple approach that can benefit all students.