The Wawascene was created by Dr. Mark Stock, former Superintendent of the Wawasee Community School Corporation. Due to its local popularity, Dr. Stock has left the blog site to future Wawasee administrators.

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Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Highlights of Master Teacher Contract

A new contract between the Wawasee Community Educators Association and the Wawasee Community School Corporation was approved in April.

Highlights of the agreement include:
  • The contract is in effect from July 1, 2010 to June 30, 2011.
  • The agreement is for a 0% salary increase for 2010-11.
  • Salary and up to two language items will be negotiated annually.
  • Parent-Teacher conference language was included for 2010-11.

In addition, a retirement incentive plan for teachers was adopted by the school board.

In these trying economic times, both the teachers and school board worked well together to find common ground for a new contract.

4 comments:

TeacherMom said...

I have heard tha one of your budget cutting ideas is to cut the Reading Recovery program. How sad! If you look at all the children this program has helped in the past I think, you too, will be saddened. I realize that this program is costly. You know the old saying, "you get what you pay for." Please look at the current research published by the US Department of Education. RR is one of the only programs that has been proven to help struggling readers learn to read.

I feel that if you cut this program, you my save some money immediately, but ultimately you wil be spending more money in the future. It is much harder to "catch a kid up" in upper elementery and beyond, then to provide intervention in the early grades.

RR is a proven intervention that fits the RTI model. What would be the substituted intervention for struggling first graders? I have had a child that struggled in first grade. He had excellent 1st grade instruction, but classroom instruction often isn't enough. He received title services, but at the time the title personel were not trained teachers andlittle growth occured. Reading Recovery was not fully implemented at the time (did not service the lowest 20 percent) and therefore, he did not receive Reading Recovery through the school system. I paid a rained RR teacher to tutor him after school and his reading was at grade level by the end of that year.

If my son had not received RR, I have no doubt that he would have been labeled LD. As you know, serving LD students is quite costly for the school district.

My children are beyond the need for Reading Recovery and I teach in another ditrict, so your decision mdoes not affect me as much as some out there. However, when I hear of short sighted decisions being made at the expense of children, I feel it is my duty to speak up.

I hope that what I have heard is not accurate and that RR wil continue at Wawasee. I fear that if this program is cut,it will not only cost us a great deal of money in a few years, but it will cost some children their love for learning and eventually the drop out rate will increase.

Joy Goshert, Director of Curriculum and Instruction said...

Wawasee Community Schools will have the same number of reading interventionists that we had for the 2009-2010 school year. We understand the importance of providing early intervention to our struggling readers in the primary grades.

However, we will be following more of a true Response to Instruction (RTI) model during the 2010-2011 school year; this involves working with students in small grups (Tier 2) prior to working with students on-on-one (Tier 3). We will be using the program Leveled Literacy Intervention which has reading interventionists working with small groups of students initially. The majority of our reading interventionists are trained in Reading Recovery. The small groups will allow us to reach more students earlier. During the second part of the school year, there may be some students that will need another tier of instruction/intervention that might be one-on-one reading instruction similar to Reading Recovery.

Reading Recovery is one-on-one reading intervention/instruction, and a true Reading Recovery model had us taking the very lowest students and working one-on-one with them first. Other struggling students who could have benefited from additional reading help often had not received that intense help until later in the school year.

In a true Reading Recovery program, our half-time Reading Recovery teachers worked with a total of eight students each year. Moving to using the Leveled Literacy Intervention program, our half-time reading interventionists could work with three times that many students during the school year.

You are correct that Reading Recovery is a good program but that it is an expensive program. We cannot continue to carry the costs of training teachers for Reading Recovery and paying for continuing contact hours that a true Reading Recovery program requires. We are trying to be fiscally responsible and meet the needs of more students.

Anonymous said...

Don't believe the LLI hype! Reading Recovery is still better and has the long term data to back it up.

Anonymous said...

No one was questioning the data of Reading Recovery - it's the cost of Reading Recovery that is the problem for the amount of students that can be served when schoola are having to cut large amounts of dollars from budgets.