And as a district, we continue to we're continuing to invest in those professional uh learning, specifically Ruler for those proactive approaches and Sanford Harmony uh for the teaching of the social emotional skills and relationship building so that all of the all of the students and all the adults are just not reacting to behavior but really responding to the need of the child. Therefore, shaping the conditions for success emotionally, socially, and academically. Um, we're also in the process of, like I said before, really just creating those systems and those structures. Um, really in or in order to support that vision and really just I'm a data person. I'm I'm a data nerd and so in order to just really track everything and just see is what we're doing effective. Um, and I look forward to when I have the amazing data that Sarah Beth shows like this is where we started and this is how much we've grown.
Um, we're just not quite there yet because I'm wearing two hats still. Um, so how do we Oops. So the next question was is how do we ensure that adult convenience or routines is not the primary driver in decisions about student discipline especially when it um it may be in conflict with the district's values of inclusion, restoration, and growth. Um, one of the ways that we're safeguarding against this is through our intentional use of restorative practices. In many cases, students receive multiple layers of intervention and support before a suspension has even occurred. Parents are a part of this as well. Assistant um or the adult in the child's life, assistant principles and those sightbased teams are consistently working um behind the scenes really just holding those restorative conversations or providing a project for a student, engaging in reflection, skill building, providing mentorship for the child.
um as well as involving all of the families or the adult in the child's life long before suspensions are even considered. There are unfortunately circumstances when a suspension may happen before an intervention has taken place, but that's usually more of an extreme place of something like vaping. However, when um that does happen, those restorative practice when the child does return um there's often projects, there's often opportunities for teaching. There's those are al often occurring once a child returns to school. So it's not just like you're suspended, you're gone, but it's okay now you're coming back to us. How are we going to teach you? How are we going to support you? How are we going to move forward? Or if harm has been caused in a situation, how are we going to repair that harm to our school family, to our class family? Um each site also uses like the district's behavior matrix as a reference for consistency and equity.
the assistant, you know, principles ensure that they're not using it in isolation or the behavior teams, but really collaboratively and they're frequently consulting with one another as well as um the principles and other administration um to apply interventions that match the students needs. Um we oftent times used to reach out to Dr. Dupin, now we're going to be reaching out to Dr. Pombo to walk through some of those sometimes when it's a little bit more complex situation. Um but we're really committed to those restorative learning opportunities. And then in addition to those tools, um we track those interventions and teaching opportunities for the students as well as the adults because sometimes the harm is caused by the adult and we have to res have those restorative conversations myself included when um and we have to restore those conversations with the student um and say, you know, I was really frustrated in this moment.
I'm sorry as the adult. let's talk about what I can do to better support you and how um we can work together in those situations. So, that's a a critical reflection point for us as a district and the student support team. Um are we teaching those behaviors that we expect to see? Um just because like we have to teach kids to read, we have to teach kids to write. We we have to teach those expected behaviors and are we monitoring that progress and all of that's going to be tracked through Edge Climber. Perfect. Thank you, Dr. Burgers. And I think the next questions were for um Miss Miss Kaiser for exceptional student services. Yes. Thank you, Madam President. Governing board members, Mr. Man, executive team, thank you for the opportunity to highlight some of the work we started um last year as well as share with our call to action moving forward.
Um just since I had the opportunity, I'd like to highlight two of my teammates, our small but mighty ESS team, please. um our instructional our one instructional coach right now, Miss Dorothy Green, and our newest member, Dr. Kathy Essus, as a manager. So, thanks. Let me highlight my proud teammates today. Um as many of you know, um thank you for your support as we did um we did adopt a reading program last year with governing board support through McGra Hill, our corrective reading and reading mastery. We are in year one. These are some follow-up questions that we shared um with the governing board. Um and we too really appreciate your very thoughtful thoughtful questions. Um, one of the questions was, according to the report, only 38% of the regional exceptional student services teachers have received the McGra Hill training compared to 56 districtwide. These programs serve our highest need learners.
And how are we addressing this disparity in support? If I may provide just some scope to what was offered, um, our full day paid um, training for um, we collaborated with McGra Hill. Um, they came in and provided a full day training. We worked with our CIA team to schedule it on July 26, which was the day that all of our new Kraton employees were on contract and just three days prior to the first day of school with the hopes to bred the opportunity for our teachers off contract to have that paid opportunity for that Friday. We very much recognize some of our colleagues are on vacation and cannot attend and we very much recognize that as a part of our way to provide then the ongoing relevant professional development learning for those who did receive it and may not have received it. We did prioritize all of our Kraton professional learning the former affinity days throughout the year um as noted in August, November, February and April um to focus on the implementation and development of our SRRA our McGraill materials.
Those trainings did include our coaching team as well as intermittently our trainer from McGraill to provide um support ongoing support. Um we additionally had a McGraill trainer come and um visit and observe classrooms with fidelity checklists and support to also provide that ongoing relevant um training throughout the year. How long do we get those benefits or are they limited time after we adopt it? Pardon? Sorry. Sorry. How long do we get that benefit of having them come down or is that just a limited time after the adoption? Typically it's uh your professional development is embedded in your quote. Um McGraw Hill has been very very flexible with us. In fact, we ti we we purposely asked if we had some carryover from last year to bring into this year and they yielded. And so we're trying to be very thoughtful in how that's done. Um but typically it's part of that contract and part of the quote um the professional development hours and then we work with the um vendor to see how can that best be distributed.
Gotcha. Thank you. Um one of the follow-up questions is how does how are we addressing this disparity in support? And so one thing we're recognizing is that our teachers are working very very hard and sometimes offcontract time can be a challenge for them to attend because of other commitments, other jobs and families. So as we have been working um with our Mcgre Hill trainer and our ESS team, we're really going to work on prioritizing again those training hours as you mentioned as Gibson McClean on our time during the school day during contracted time. So focusing those professional developments on our um creating professional learning um again continuing that on-site support through our coaching. So we have those individualized supports um to our teachers in the um curriculum program. We also attend special education site team meetings our team does to provide some additional support specific to that team or that campus.
Um and also we'll continue to participate in the learning walks um with our leadership team. And also next year we're looking forward to implementing fidelity walks with the um McGra Hill curriculum so that we were able to provide ongoing individualized fidelity checks and individualized coaching to teachers who might be at different proficiency levels. Do we have a set goal of moving this 38% to a certain percent by next year? Um for the teachers who are McGraill McGraill trained pardon my stuttering. Um yes, that is our goal. Um in working with um our trainer to provide and working with Marie Twist who supports our new educator orientation the first week back. We're just trying to finalize and kind of all vying for that same time, but our hope is to provide that um that day training when all teachers are back on contract as opposed to a before during the summer.
So yes. Yes, ma'am. Thank you. Um the next question had to do with increasing the fidelity and the pacing. Um so we wanted to really talk about what the McGraill wants um SRRA to look like the implementation of reading mastery as well as corrective reading. Um I have the benefit of having taught this program for over 10 years at Macken School when I was a resource teacher and a reading interventionist. So that gives me u a different lens because I taught it. It also allows me to do a lot of um modeling the lessons which I've done across multiple campuses and any teacher that's asked I've been able to go in and model lessons and then have them teach and then I observe them and then if I need to model more or if they I'm watching them to see that again that fidelity to the program.
I would say we're probably 70 to 80% in terms of fidelity. It's it's a very precise program. Um there's it's a there it's scripted. It's direct instruction. It's very explicit. There are specific components to it. It's all researchbased and best practice. But if you start adding other extraneous components, it affects your pacing. If you skip things, that's going to obviously impact your student outcomes. So, it's a matter of helping the teachers understand the importance of every single element of the program. It's all very intentional. There's reason for every part of it, and it's really about getting the staff to be able to implement it with that full fidelity. So, that's what we've been working on the most. The goal is to teach two levels. So, reading mastery is for K2 students. So, it's really teaching students how to read that do not know how to read.
So, it's, you know, phmic awareness, it's, you know, phonics, it's all the different letters and sounds and blending, all the different skills that go with learning to read. That's designed to be for kindergarten through 2 grade students. There are times when we will place a third or fourth grade student in there if they have shown not to be ready for the corrective reading program. The corrective reading program is called that for a reason. at students who are in third through 8th grade and have been taught how to read but have not shown a a high level of accuracy with their reading skill. So they've got a lot of splinter skills. They've kind of sort of get some of it but not all of it. And it's really to correct inaccuracies and it's to help them build that fluency and that accuracy with their reading so that they can then start working on the comprehension which is the biggest part of reading right you have to learn to read but then you have to read to learn and you have to be able to show that in order to show that on the state assessments first we have to be able to read.
So the corrective reading the goal is for them to pass two levels per year. The levels are it's a little irrelevant right now, but it's A, B1, B2, and C, and they're all aligned to different grade levels of reading ability. So, the students take a diagnostic placement test that groups them not by grade level, but by reading ability, and then the teachers put those together in their schedules. This year being the first year of implementing it in a number of years required some amendments to IEPs because perhaps students that needed the program didn't have the right number of service minutes. So IEPs needed to be amended, which means bringing IEP teams together, discussing the program with parents, getting them on board with their student needing this level of intense reading instruction, then providing it. And in order to get the results that McGraill wants us to get and that we want to get obviously, which is two years worth of growth for every school year, teachers have to be keeping to a really tight pace.
So that's another area where we realize that we need to keep working on because some schools, some teachers did better than others. And we did collect that data. Um, is there anything else on this slide I'm missing? We'll get to it. This is the data I looked at it from. So we created data tracking logs um before we even implemented the program at the beginning of the year so that we would have the teachers on a regular basis tracking the progress that they were making and the pace that they were following. Then at the end of the year I personally analyzed all of that data at the teacher level. Then we merged it onto the school level and this represents the district level of that data. So we have it broken down disagregated all the way down to the individual teacher and individual student group data.
You know if and when you want to see that in the future. But this illustrates what we found overall was the district average. So we had 293 students that took part of either reading mastery or corrective reading which all comes under the McGraill SRRA program. The average number of lessons taught was 59. Some some students got less, some students got more. It's an average. What McGra Hill recommends is about 130 lessons per year. So you can see that that's an area that we need to work on and improve in in terms of the pacing. Being new to the program, there's probably four teachers that implemented the program this year that had taught it before. Everybody else was new to the program. It takes a while to get good at implementing a new program. So the pacing um is difficult to stay up with if you when you're first learning how to implement it.
Then in terms of mastery tests are those progress monitoring checks for understanding through they're layered throughout the program. There's a various amount depending on what level the students are in but every the average number of mastery tests given was nine and then the average passing rate was 88%. So that's actually pretty good and the the program is designed for mastery. So, they would want to see 100%. You don't go on to the next level until you master this level. You don't go on to the next level until you master this level. It's not uh well, that's close enough. We'll go on. It's designed to really really get that high high level of accuracy and fluency. Now, the question that I have is this specific programming is just for the places programs that we have. You know how we have four different programs? Sorry, I didn't mean to say places.
that's specifically for those groups or it's districtwide for any? This is the because we have obviously exceptional students in gened classes that so it's for anybody in Oh, that's a great question. So, it's not for every single student that has an IEP. It's specifically for students who have basic reading as one of their areas of eligibility. One of their areas of need has to be basic reading. We have students with IEPs that have speech only needs. We have students with IEPs that only have goals and services in math. They aren't being given the SR program. Then there's that diagnostic placement test that places them into the program. That's a good question about the regional programs. Um, many of our students in the regional programs actually qualify for alternate assessments because of their level of disability and they wouldn't test into this program when they do the diagnostic placement because they're actually not able to fully participate in it.
Got it. Yeah. Thank you for that clarification. Yeah. Other questions about for me right now implementation. Okay. Did you questions on that one? Good. Okay. Thank you. Another question that came up is how is the district ensuring that students with disabilities are part of our core goals for reading and math proficiency? And further asking, what disagregated student progress data currently exists? What targets short and long-term have been set for regional program students? This is a great question and while we're proud of the action we've taken thus far, we very much recognize this is our work moving forward. So you see some of the highlights of the work we have and also the work we have to come. That call to action in asking the first layer is how are we ensuring that our students and disos are part of our core core goals for reading and math proficiency.
Our students in special education are general education students first and in fact the majority of our students as you mentioned President Creo are sitting in the general education classroom the majority of the day. So part of what our collaboration with Dr. Pombo and the CIA team is really merging our two um departments to work very closely together. And I know we have different um ways to go, but being part of those learning walks throughout the year to be looking at that success criteria. Think of that Hadtie's work of learning targets and success criteria, whether it be through classroom observations, through our coaching cycles, through classroom visits to be in the room to understand what's happening in the classroom. Coaching cycles, as I mentioned, um each of our campuses um under the support of our um principles do offer and support special education team meetings. Some meet weekly, some meet once a month.