White County Schools will strengthen literacy instruction across its middle and high schools after receiving a $400,000 state grant.
Director of Schools Kurt Dronebarger said the district was awarded the four-year Comprehensive Literacy State Development Grant. Dronebarger said the funding will focus on enhancing teaching strategies and supporting students in grades 6 through 12.
“It’s going to help us to partner with some other agencies to come in and train and work with our teachers and work with our instructional materials and how they deliver them and to help us to increase our literacy efforts here in White County,” Dronebarger said.
The district plans to partner with the National Institute for Excellence in Teaching (NIET), an organization that has worked with school systems across Tennessee, to provide training and support for educators. He said the focus will be on improving how teachers use existing curriculum and instructional tools.
“They’re going to be using the already adopted curriculum, but maybe helping them focus on a different way,” Dronebarger said. “We’ll use a lot of things called, we have a lot of acronyms, but IPGs or Instructional Practice Guides. There will be some implementation of some other literacy materials to help go alongside the high-quality instructional materials that we already have. So it’s going to be using a lot of the already approved curriculum materials that we have, but just deploying them in a more, with better fidelity.”
Dronebarger said while progress has been made in recent years, the district still faces challenges when it comes to student proficiency.
“We see some dips in certain grade levels, and certainly as a state we’ve made huge strides in ELA, and we have here in White County, but our numbers are still, our proficiency rates are still below 50% in most of our schools, and so that’s not acceptable in any measure, in any metric,” Dronebarger said. “So we want to see that grow, we want to see it rise, and so we’re using these grant funds to bring in some folks to help us, coach us in ways that we can improve.”
Dronebarger said student progress will be measured through ongoing benchmark testing, as well as end-of-year TCAP and EOC exams. Dronebarger said those results will serve as key indicators of the program’s success.
“So we benchmark test throughout the year, so there’ll be a number of times where these students will be tested to see, and we can look at those numbers and judge them against prior students and these students’ past performance,” Dronebarger said. “But certainly TCAP test and EOC test at the end of the year will be the true measure of how successful we are.”
Beyond test scores, Dronebarger said the long-term impact of improved literacy skills impacts students’ futures.
“It sure does,” Dronebarger said. “And it’s great to be able to bring in people that, you know, this is expensive training, but for the district in and of itself, maybe I have a hard time to budget bringing in folks like this to help us. So when we get these grant funds, it’s certainly a boost to not only the pocketbook, but to what we’re able to do with students in a meaningful way.”
The grant includes approximately $90,000 allocated for the first year.