Student achievement need

Our High School is identified as a school in need of improvement in math and English performance for subgroups SWD and Economically disadvantaged and participation for subgroup SWD. The greatest challenge in our district is forming a strong reading foundation for our students in Pre-k through grade three. Our goal is to have all students reading at or above grade level by the completion of grade three. Then our efforts are in reading for comprehension across the disciplines. Our economically disadvantaged students and our swd students begin to lose momentum in their reading comprehension skills as they progress through the Middle and High School. As we studied the root cause, it became apparent that large class sizes made individualized instruction difficult leading to larger gaps in the abilities of these two subgroups. Since our economically disadvantaged population is large (over 50%) our challenge becomes school wide programming that addresses reading comprehension. Our students are not performing well in math because of their poor reading comprehension skills. These same poor reading comprehension skills are effecting science and social studies assessments. Our students understand the math concepts and processes but have difficulty deciphering what is asked of them.