Spotlight Reading School B

School B, one of six elementary schools in its district, is approximately 40 miles southeast of Houston. Although School B has had success with students passing the third-grade Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) for reading, it experienced a decrease in numbers of passing students from 2003 to 2004. The district superintendent and the principal had been introduced to a 3-tier reading model and had already begun to investigate implementation steps prior to being selected as a Spotlight 3-Tier school.

After being selected as a Spotlight 3-Tier school in the fall of 2004, a campus leadership team formed and met to develop a campus action plan. The team members indicated that they were satisfied with the status of core reading instruction and that they needed to focus on intervention, Tiers II and III of the model. At a subsequent review, they revised the action plan to further enhance core instruction and to ensure that components of scientifically based reading research were implemented in all three tiers of the model. School B serves some of the district's bilingual Spanish students, and the bilingual Spanish teachers have been included in the professional development provided to the other K-3 teachers.

The 2006-2007 school year began with the appointment of a new principal. The on-site bilingual Spanish facilitator expanded her duties to include coordinating the bilingual Spanish services across the district, in addition to providing intervention instruction at School B two days a week.

School B continues to focus on using assessment data to drive instruction in all areas of implementing its 3-tier model. In the beginning of the 2006-2007 school year, teachers studied the end-of-year data for 2005-2006 and noticed strong results from the kindergarten and first-grade Tier I and Tier II instruction. In addition, third-grade TAKS scores had improved after one year of implementation of the model. Second- and third-grade core and intervention instruction was a focus in the 2006-2007 school year. These students were the last cohort of students who did not have the opportunity to benefit from strong Tier I instruction in kindergarten and first grade.

In the 2007-2008 school year, School B began supporting its district in implementing a 3-Tier reading model districtwide. In addition, School B began to implement a 3-Tier model in mathematics.

In 2008-2009, School B sustained its implementation of a 3-Tier model in both reading and math.