This summer, dozens of rising fourth graders on the Kenai Peninsula are heading back to school early for summer reading intervention classes as part of the Alaska Reads Act. District staff hope the summer instruction will give those students a leg up ahead of the school year that starts next week.
Last Friday, Tanya Erwin sat in her classroom at Kalifornsky Beach Elementary School, working with two third grade students on phonemic awareness.
“Say third,” she said.
“Third,” the students responded.
“Without the ‘th,’” she said.
“Ird,” they replied.
“Good,” she said.
Erwin’s playing what she called “word games” with her two students.
“We play with sounds — I call it word games, but it's phonemic awareness — and it's because when you're sending out words, you have to kind of play with the sounds until it sounds like the word that you recognize,” she said.
Most students in the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District don’t go back to school until next week. But for the 126 third graders who tested below benchmark in reading at the end of last semester, school started earlier than usual.
Under the Alaska Reads Act, those students either had to be held back a year or undergo 20 hours of additional literacy practice before starting fourth grade. Parents were able to pick between a paper workbook, an online program and five days of in-person instruction — or a combination — to meet that 20 hour requirement.
Janae Van Slyke is the principal at K-Beach Elementary. On Friday, she said scheduling the sessions close to the start of the 2024-2025 school year was intentional — to counteract what she called the “summer slide.”
“What happens over the summer is they might not be reading as much as they would if they were in school for six hours a day, evening if they are doing 20 minutes of reading at home every night,” she said. “And so the idea of having this little boost of summer school right before school starts is to give them that extra plug before they go back into school.”
About half — 64 — of the students who need summer reading intervention opted for the in-person option. It wasn’t always guaranteed that option would be available. But, the district received a $100,000 grant from the Alaska Department of Education and Early Development’s Alyeska Reading Institute that is helping pay for staff, student transportation and snacks, among other things.
In all, 12 of the district’s 42 schools offered 20 hours of in-person instruction this summer. Three schools at the head of Kachemak Bay held their sessions earlier this summer to align with the schools’ variance calendar. The grant meant the district could afford to cap the student-to-teacher ratio at ten students per teacher.
At K-Beach, six students participated in in-person instruction with two teachers. Van Slyke said small group sizes are to the students’ benefit.
“We know having kids in person is what's best for reading instruction and all instruction,” she said. “So to be able to have kids come in during the summer and get to work in small groups and focus on their learning based on where their instructional knowledge is currently at and meeting individual needs. It's an incredible opportunity, and we're really happy about it.”
Melissa Linton, the district’s curriculum coordinator, agrees. Holding sessions at so many schools means students likely already know the teachers they’ll be working with, and vice versa.
“Teachers, from the data that they had in the springtime, have a pretty good idea of where the kids left off,” she said. “And also that’s why we did it school-based. Because our teachers here, like Nikki and Tanya, they’re going to know these kids and what they need.”
The first day of school for most KPBSD students is next Wednesday, Aug. 21.
