STARPOINT: District seeing improvement in basic literacy

By Joe Olenick<br><a href="mailto:joe.olenick@lockportjournal.com">E-mail Joe</a>

PENDLETON — Starpoint is seeing an improvement in literacy skills from its primary students, according to results from a study presented Monday.

Sean Croft, director of instruction, assessment and staff development at Starpoint, gave the Board of Education an update on how students in kindergarten through second grade were progressing under the DIBELS assessment program. DIBELS stands for Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills, which is how a school can measure if students are on the right track as they learn to read.

According to Croft, Starpoint’s kindergartners and first-graders are improving their literacy skills. So are incoming kindergartners, as the district is also seeing an increase of kindergartners who are meeting the DIBELS benchmark, or the national average at a particular grade level, in the beginning of the year. As the 2009-10 school year will start, 62 percent of kindergartners are coming into the district at the benchmark, up from 56 percent the year before. Only 6 percent were coming to the school as intensive needs students, down from 10 percent one year ago.

Board of Education members were happy to hear the news Monday. Board Vice President Michael Zimmerman said it was great to see how universal pre-kindergarten was helping students.

“Hopefully we’ll keep seeing those numbers go up,” he said.

Under DIBELS students are tested at the beginning of the year, again in the middle of the school year and a third time at the end. The goal is to get students to score at benchmark, but DIBELS also finds which students need extra attention, so the school can get help to them early. Starpoint began the program in January 2007.

“It’s all about early identification,” Croft said. “And then getting those kids into research-based intervention to hopefully help them out with those critical early reading skills.”

According to the presentation, about 76 percent of Starpoint kindergartners reached benchmark by the end of the 2006-07 school year. The number dipped slightly in the following school year at 72 percent, but went back up at the conclusion of the previous school year, with about 78 percent hitting benchmark in 2008-09.

First-graders were scored under the DIBELS assessments beginning with the 2007-08 school year, with 76 percent of students reaching benchmark. In 2008-09 school year, 80 percent of first-graders hit the benchmark score. Croft also said there was an increase in the average amount of words read per minute for first-graders, to 70 up from 60 words in 2007-08.

Second-graders’ DIBELS scores were tracked beginning in 2008-09, with 70 percent of students reaching the benchmark level.

Croft presented evidence that the DIBELS approach is working. Starpoint’s scores went up in 2008-09 for the third-grade state English Language Arts assessments. The goal of the assessment is to have students score a level 3 or 4, which 94 percent of Starpoint third-graders did, compared to 83 percent in 2007-08 and 76 percent of all Western New York school districts in 2008-09. In 2006-07, about 79.7 percent of Starpoint third-graders scored a level 3 or 4.

Contact reporter Joe Olenick at 439-9222, ext. 6241.