Competency 4:!

Curriculum, Instruction, Supervision

Related Task 4.5 Ability to conduct long-range planning in terms of instructional needs and staff involvement. Specic Task 4.5.4 Work with faculty committee to identify and prioritize educational needs of a school or district. Narrative description of specic task: An additional $15,529 in Title I money has been allocated to Lockwood Elementary and must be used to support the Building Improvement Plan and the School-Wide Intervention Plan. Working with the Title I team a half-time Title I teacher will be hired and the job description will be created (with the input of the new staff member) based on the needs of the building. Process Part of any administrators job is using the funds available in a way to get the greatest impact on student learning. Unfortunately planning ahead is not always easy with the ways schools are currently funded. The uctuation in per-pupil funding along with other items beyond the schools control like rapidly increasing insurance costs and the cost of fuel oil make planning a budget difcult to say the least. Often the money schools count on turns out to not be available, but sometimes the opposite happens and sums become available at the last minute and administrators have to scramble to create a plan to put the money to use. The Title I teacher and I sat down when $15,529 became available through Title I funding and brainstormed ideas of how it could best be utilized. Admittedly we did not have the opportunity to spend as much time on it as we would have liked because we were informed about the money by email over break followed by 4 snow days. With the proposal due Monday this meant we had to have it to the person that was in charge of the districts Title I funds by the end of the day. Fortunately we were able to sit down and clear a few hours in the morning to talk. The rst thing to decide was what group to target. We decided to target the bottom end of the Tier 2 reading students because we felt that Tier 3 students were already receiving the necessary interventions through Title I and Special Education and the Tier 2 were the ones that were currently falling through the cracks. By targeting Tier 2 we could hopefully raise them into Tier 1, but at the least keep them from falling further behind. The two of us discussed a variety of options including before and after school programs, a summer school program, and adding another Title teacher to provide pull out during the day. I expressed my desire to increase the amount of reading at home by adding a book take home element and we began formulating our plan. The decision was made not to do the before or after school extended day program nor the summer program because we could not be sure to get the students we wanted to target since we would

be dependent on the parents cooperation. We then decided to use the money to hire a 1/2 time teacher to work with the targeted group of students using the Wilson Reading Program described later. In addition we identied another group of students in Tier 2 that would receive books to take home daily that were part of a guided reading program that are no longer used in the building, but we still had the materials for. In order to run the program we added an hour (30 minutes at the beginning and another 30 minutes at the end) to the school day for our four Title I para-pros. During those times they would meet with a group of the students to discuss their book and then help them choose another one at their appropriate reading level. Next we hired the part-time Title I teacher, whom we had already had in mind when we designed the program and had checked with to make sure she was interested before we moved forward. Kimber served as our 1/2 time Reading Coach and was glad to have an opportunity to work directly with students. The rst thing we did was look at DIBELS data for students that were in 2nd grade and below level, but were not currently being serviced as part of TIER 3 intervention by the Title I staff. Next was seeing if intervention for those students t into their schedule (not being pulled from specials, Reading Street, or math), which was a major road block. Once that was set up they began with Wilson Reading Program, a phonics based program for the 1st graders, but that did not meet the needs of the 2nd graders. For those students Kimber began using 6 Minute Fluency. Once they program began she noticed several were having issues with spelling rules so she had to go back and cover some of those also. In order to achieve one of the original goals of increasing the amount of reading at home she also sends books home with each student with some activities to do with an adult. When students get to class the rst thing Kimber does is check their reading slips and pick a new book. She feels it is successful because students are advancing in the program, but more importantly in conversations with the students they express they are more condent and using some of the strategies taught in their regular classrooms. Due the how quickly we had to set up the program we did not have measures in place to determine its effectiveness, but she and I have since discussed ways to measure success by looking at the DIBELS scores for those targeted students. Lessons Learned: I was surprised by how quickly all of this had to be done and how much was actually involved in the proposal and the budget itself. The money became available without any warning (in fact talking to the person that oversees our Title I funds I learned that something similar happened last year and she was assured it would not happen again) and if the money was not spent then it would be lost. Not only that the way we spent the money had to be directly tied to the building improvement plan, which arriving to the building as the administrator in November (previously I was an 8th grade social studies teacher) I had not seen yet and it took a while to nd since nobody was sure exactly where it was. In addition since we are a Title I building we had to make sure our proposal also t that plan. Then we had to check with the personnel person in the district to see what the actual cost would be to extend the para-pros day and hire Kimber 1/2 time. Since this would be out of a different fund (her Reading Coach salary is Title 2A money) there would be a different form submitted weekly showing her hours.

As a result of this process I now understand a lot more about funding sources and the number of issues in creating a new position. In addition, I became familiar with the building and Title plan and it has made me more comfortable with my role as we work on creating the Building Improvement Plan for next year.