Lake County Gazette

The Northshore School District School Board members hosted an evening board of education meeting regarding a program that’ll assess and monitor students’ fluency growth on June 14 at its office in Highland Park.

“I know you've heard me preach about the power of collaboration among our teachers,” Kevin Ryan, assistant superintendent for teaching and learning for the district, said during the meeting. “One of the main goals of this was to provide a structured format for our teachers to be able to collaborate using formative data and planning together, developing instructional pedagogy, instructional plans based on looking at that particular data, plan standards-aligned instruction to deliver to students. Ultimately the hope was to improve student performance outcomes.”

CBS News Chicago reported the board held a closed-door meeting in July regarding helping students cope and understand the traumas of mass shooting events. One of the district’s schools, Oak Terrace Elementary School, began a form of help through bring therapy dogs to students.

“We are here to provide arms, literally and figuratively of love and compassion, so that we together as a community and as a school community, can get past this mass violence incident with love, care, and compassion,” Michael Lubelfeld, superintendent of the district, said to CBS News.

The Red Oak and Oak Terrace elementary schools were chosen for the student fluency project as they are both K-5 dual language schools. These two schools have the largest populations of poverty students and English learning students, which also happen to be the groups that need the most help.

Superintendent Lubelfeld came into his position after Michelle Reid, the previous superintendent, left the district at the end of the last academic year.

The first step in the process was administering a pretest to all students in which students were asked to read a one-minute passage and were marked on how many words they could read in 60 seconds. Each teacher had a coach that they regularly met with to make goals and plans based on their students’ performances and progress.

The University of North Georgia noted studying a second language makes the learner more attractive to employers because knowing multiple languages opens communication for any role, such as writing a news story in English and Spanish.

While each grade level had a different specific goal to measure their progress, 65% of the 171 participants at Oak Terrace achieved their specific goal and 45% of the 135 participants at Red Oak met their goal. In grades K-3 all groups at Oak Terrace were more successful in reaching their goals, grades 4 and 5 were much closer between the two groups, with Red Oak being more successful in grade 4 and a tie between the two grade 5 groups.