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| Steel Valley enlists a village to support children in early literacy |
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Becky Campbell never imagined that her daughter, Rylee, might test below peers when she took her for the pre-kindergarten screening offered in Steel Valley School District. If anything, Campbell thought all of the work they did at home together and the extra year Rylee had spent in preschool because of a late year birthday would give her little girl an edge.
Finding otherwise not only prompted Campbell to enter Rylee in two support programs that Steel Valley provides, it turned her into an advocate for the district’s early literacy initiatives. Earlier this year, she even joined the committee that organizes them.
The reason: like the majority of other kids Steel Valley has tracked over the three years since it launched support programs for kindergarteners testing below norms, Rylee has caught up.
“I’m passionate about it,” Campbell said, adding that the district’s summer literacy camp and after-school program helped raise her daughter’s performance to the 90th percentile. “I want to be able to explain to parents what’s available so that they’ll take advantage of these programs. What this district offers is fantastic.”
With coaching and support from The Consortium for Public Education, Steel Valley was among a network of districts whose Leadership Design teams began four years ago exploring ways to improve learning readiness among its elementary students. The district’s spring literacy fair, now in its fourth year, and the follow-up support programs grew from the Steel Valley team’s work.
“We wanted to educate parents and give them resources to help their kids,” said Jill Salopek, a secondary instruction coach who specializes in language arts and chairs the Leadership Design team’s literacy committee. The efforts started with a fair where Steel Valley invited parents to learn about the district’s kindergarten program and provided literacy kits so they could work at home with their children to build basic skills. The district also offered an assessment to help parents understand whether their preschoolers had mastered everything they’d be expected to know when kindergarten started. For those who needed extra help, Steel Valley launched its summer literacy camp and after school programs and began data collection to ensure their effectiveness.
The Consortium seeded the early literacy initiative in Steel Valley and 10 other districts with $5,000 challenge grants. It also published the early literacy guide that these districts distribute to get parents engaged in helping their children from infancy on to build visual and verbal skills that are essential for reading—from identifying shapes and colors, to rhyming words and learning the alphabet.
Steel Valley has built upon those resources, enlisting local social service organizations, libraries, municipal agencies and even business owners to contribute time, talents and funding to its literacy fairs. From the first small event that drew 30 families, the fair has tripled in attendance, to more than 90 families at the latest. Of the 100 children in attendance, 55 took the pre-kindergarten assessment tests.
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Dad signs up preschooler for sneak preview of kindergarten
Community support also has grown, from a handful of community partners the first year to representatives of 40 organizations and businesses, ranging from EMS teams that gave presentations on first aid to banks that talked about children’s savings accounts. Salopek said the literacy fair also has drawn volunteers from every level of the district’s K-12 program. Like her, educators throughout the system recognize that, for the students they’ll teach, “The K-3 years are crucial. That’s when kids are learning to read. After K-3, they’re reading to learn,” Salopek said.
Steel Valley is a prime example of how districts have used their Leadership Design Teams and the literacy grants to engage families before children reach school age and to leverage community support, said The Consortium’s Executive Director, Linda Croushore, Ed.D. “Steel Valley is really reaching out to grow their programs. It’s the classic case of it enlisting a village to raise a child.”
The outreach has helped draw many young mothers “who don’t know how to begin,” said Salopek. “A lot of them had children at a very young age and they may have come from families where education wasn’t valued. I think they come to the literacy fair because it’s a non-threatening situation and there’s no fee; if you want to sit in on class you can, if you just want to come for pizza, that’s OK too. But you’re still leaving with that literacy kit and you’re getting to meet the educators who will be teaching your child.”
Campbell didn’t fit that profile when she took Rylee to the fair. Before becoming a stay-at-home mom, she’d taken courses in elementary education herself. Even so, it’s hard to assess your own child’s level of preparation or to know what’s expected by the time kindergarten starts, she said.
“I didn’t know what my child was supposed to know. I thought preschool was handling this and that my daughter was prepared,” she said. While it helped her daughter in important social and emotional aspects of development, however, preschool didn’t prepare her academically, Campbell found.
Although Steel Valley’s literacy committee already is working to collaborate with preschools, it’s one area where Campbell would like to use her committee service to do more. “It would be wonderful if we could get all of the preschools involved.”
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