The Kenai Peninsula Borough School District is preparing to roll out its first intensive summer reading instruction for some third grade students, with some help from the state’s education department. The grant will be used to add more in-person instruction opportunities for district students who need extra reading support this summer.
The summer programming is a mandate of the Alaska Reads Act. That’s the landmark legislation passed in 2022 , which aims to get students reading at grade level by the time they finish third grade.
A component of that bill requires third grade students who test below benchmark on literacy assessments at the end of the school year to either be held back or participate in additional reading instruction over the summer.
Within KPBSD, that instruction is either 20 hours of in-person learning, online exercises completed at home or a physical workbook supplied by the district. In early May, the district wasn’t sure it would be able to offer in-person instruction because of the associated cost.
So, it applied for $50,000 from the state’s Alyeska Reading Institute to help pay for staff to administer the instruction. Late last month, the district learned it would receive $100,000 — double its request.
With the money, KPBSD will offer 20 hours of in-person instruction at a dozen elementary school sites around the Kenai Peninsula. The grant will also pay for staff wages, student transportation and materials. As of May 5, 122 KPBSD third-grade students tested below benchmark and were at risk of being held back.
District Assistant Superintendent Kari Dendurent says grant money in excess of the district’s original request will be used to increase the amount of staff providing in-person instruction.
“We are looking at spending money on intervention materials,” Dendurent said. “So that was the additional funds. And then also ensuring that instead of having a 10:1 ratio, with teacher to student, we’ll be doing an 8:1 ratio. So we have some schools that will actually probably have two instructors instead of just one instructor.”
KPBSD’s three schools at the head of Kachemak Bay follow a variance calendar that aligns with the religious holidays observed by the Russian Old Believer communities. Two of those schools — Kachemak Selo and Voznesenka — held their summer reading intervention last week.
Annie Robinson administered that intervention, to about nine students in total. There weren’t a lot of third graders in need of extra support at Voznesenka. So, she said they opened the in-person instruction to first and second graders, too, as well as students attending Kachemak Selo.
She says between four and six students attended the in-person instruction each day across the three grade levels.
“I broke them up into groups,” Robinson said. “And we do kind of like a rotation, one of the stations being working with me, and then one of the stations being like a iPad-based reading intervention that they had been working on — Boost, this reading intervention that's on the iPad — the entire year, 15 minutes a day. So they just continued that as well. And then, you know, one of the stations being also like a workbook-type, like phonics skills review, and then the last station being just a library time.”
Most of her students have individual needs when it comes to reading intervention, although there are some commonalities, Robinson says. Vowel sounds, for example, can be tricky for students because they can sound similar. The small group sizes, though, combined with her existing familiarity with students’ strengths and weaknesses, made her feel like she was able to provide the support her students needed.
By the end of the week, during which four hours of instruction was delivered across five days, Robinson says she saw growth among her students. The district uses oral reading fluency, or the number of words a student can read from a grade-level text in 60 seconds, to gauge success.
Robinson says that rate increased by between seven and 40 words for students over the course of the week.
“The kids that came are the kids that want to be there, too, you know?” she said. “And so that's always helpful. They like, you know, they like to read, they just need a little bit of help getting, you know, getting a little better at that.”
A key skill difference between students in third versus fourth grade, she says, is that third graders are still learning to read, whereas fourth graders are reading to learn. That’s part of what makes literacy an important skill for rising fourth graders.
KPBSD will offer in-person reading intervention for identified third graders during the first week of August.
Dendurent, the assistant superintendent, said parents of students who tested below benchmark were notified at the end of the school year and given the option to order their preferred form of intervention. Now that the grant has been awarded and the district will for sure offer in-person instruction, the district will reach out to families individually to verify whether they are still interested in the in-person option.
