GUILDERLAND — “Everything hinges on reading,” said Theresa Smolen, through tears of gratitude, as she told the school board about her daughter, Sophie, a first-grader at Lynnwood Elementary School.

She showed pages of squiggles that Sophie had made because she couldn’t form the letters to make words. Her mother tried to work with her but grew frustrated, and so did Sophie.

“She really wanted to write but was frustrated,” Smollen said.

Then Sophie became part of the Reading Recovery program at Lynnwood and her reading teacher, Kathy State, used well-practiced strategies to help Sophie, one-on-one, learn to read and write.

Lynnwood has a special room with a one-way glass mirror where teachers learning Reading Recovery techniques can observe a teacher working with a student and then discuss what they’ve seen.

Sophie would come home from school with an envelope filled with the cut-up pieces of a sentence she had created. The sentence was written on the outside of the envelope. She’d spread the pieces of words on the table and work out the ways to put the sentence together.

Her mother watched as Sophie used new strategies to sound out words, and had fun in the process.

“This works. It really works,” an elated Theresa Smolen told the board. She displayed one of Sophie’s sentences: “Reading Recovery rocks.”

Sophie graduated from the program in 18 weeks, two weeks short of the maximum. “When I told her she was done, she cried,” said Smolen, describing, through her own tears, how much Sophie loved her teacher, who still checks on her.

“It’s made a huge difference in her confidence and self-esteem,” concluded Smolen.

^{Speaking with great enthusiasm, Ellen Reiling tells the Guilderland School Board that Reading Recovery forms a “safety net” for the lowest achieving first-grade students.  The Enterprise — Melissa Hale-Spencer}

“Cosmic shift”

The program, explained Ellen Reiling, was founded by Marie Clay.

Clay, who was from New Zealand, was named a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth; she died in 2007. Her Reading Recovery program was adopted by all New Zealand schools in 1983 and two years later, teachers and researchers from Ohio State University brought the program to the United States.

“The goal of Reading Recovery,” Reiling quoted Clay, “is to dramatically reduce the number of learners who have extreme difficulty with literacy learning and the cost of those learners to an educational system.”

She said Clay wished she had called her program Reading and Writing Recovery. The metaphor, said Reiling, is from a New Zealand term for a ship that has gone off course being “recovered” or set back on course. Reading Recovery brings an off-course child back to the trajectory of an average child, said Reiling.

If a child is struggling to read in first grade, she said, there is an 88 percent chance that child will still be struggling in fourth grade. She said that failure in the early grades virtually guarantees failure in later schooling.

Reading Recovery forms a “safety net,” she said, for the lowest achieving students. Students receive daily 30-minute lessons provided by a specially trained teacher with the goal of accelerating learning in the shortest time possible, between 12 and 20 weeks.

Reiling called this approach a “cosmic shift” since the thinking used to be that, if a child were struggling, there must be something wrong with the child, and remediation took time. With Reading Recovery, she said, “You base teaching on a child’s strengths,” and the gap is closed quickly.

This is accomplished by specially trained teachers in a three-tiered professional development model. At the top of the pyramid is Dr. James Schnug at New York University who trains and supports Reading Recovery teacher leaders who work at the district or site level. They, in turn, train teachers at the school level who work with the hardest to teach children.

Each teacher goes through an intensive year-long training with an emphasis on complex literacy processing, extensive use of a one-way glass mirror for observing and talking about lessons, and the opportunity to connect theory with practice.

In 30 years, Reiling said, 50,000 trained Reading Recovery teachers, a trademarked name with published standards, have taught 2.2 million children and 75 percent of students reach grade-level standard.

Each child’s progress is reported and analyzed annually by the International Data Evaluation Center at Ohio State University. The What Works Clearinghouse research on readers in kindergarten through third grade shows that, of the 153 reading programs reviewed, only Reading Recovery had positive effects across all four domains — alphabetics, fluency, comprehension, and general reading achievement. And Reading Recovery was the only reviewed program to receive the highest rating in general reading achievement.

By the numbers

Guilderland started the program in 2012, in a partnership with New York University; NYU, in turn, is affiliated with Ohio State, the national center for Reading Recovery.

“We were able to jump on that grant-funding stream,” said Assistant Superintendent for Instruction Demian Singleton. He told The Enterprise that the initial cost in 2012-13 to train six teachers was about $30,000, and Guilderland got funding, by working with NYU, through an i3 grant, federal funding from the Investing in Innovation (i3) Fund of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

The next year, Guilderland was established as a Regional Reading Recovery Training site and first grade teachers were taught the techniques. This year, the district was selected as a New York University Pilot School for Literacy Lessons training.

Guilderland pays an annual fee for its affiliation with Reading Recovery, Singleton said, describing the focus as being on professional development. The district has also received some federal Title 1 funds for the program, he said.

Currently, Guilderland has eight teachers certified in Reading Recovery, Singleton said, working across the district’s five elementary schools. The next step, he said, was launched this year — teaching special-education teachers, and teachers of English as a second language similar techniques in a model called Literacy Lessons. “We have three teachers doing that,” he said.

Over the course of a school year, about 70 first-graders participate in the Reading Recovery program, Singleton estimated. “There is never a down time,” he said. “We are always pulling in the lowest 20 percent of the first-grade class. Each teacher works with two students at a time.”

Singleton said it is too soon to estimate how much money is being saved by not having to perform the typical “multi-year interventions” for struggling students rather than the relatively short 12 to 20 weeks of Reading Recovery.

Singleton said that 65 percent of Guilderland students who received a complete Reading Recovery intervention reached average levels. The district aspires to reach the national average of 75 percent, he said.

Singleton told The Enterprise that the 65-percent rate is “significantly greater than any other program we’ve implemented.”

He concluded, “Inevitably, there will be cost savings associated with it.”

Marrying theory with practice

The reason the program is so effective, Reiling said is “everything is grounded on a complex literacy processing theory.” As educators watch lessons behind the glass, she said, they articulate “the why” in the teaching they observe. “You have married theory with practice,” she said.

Lois McDonald, a reading teacher at Guilderland Elementary School, explained the process and said, “We do very careful assessments every day.”

A typical Reading Recovery lesson begins with books familiar to the student. He or she reads independently as the teacher assesses. Next comes working with letters and words, writing a story, working with a cut-up sentence, and then reading a new book.

“We work with whatever a child has,” said Mary Ursilla, a reading teacher at Pine Bush Elementary School.  “We carefully choose a book that capitalizes on a child’s strengths while providing a few challenges…We prompt to that child’s needs.”

“I am better able to supply really effective reading and writing intervention,” said MacDonald of her Reading Recovery training. “It’s given me a lot to bite into and work from.”

“The commitment by these teachers is enormous,” Singleton told The Enterprise, noting the many extra hours they put in sharpening their skills.

“Further down the road, as they expand their expertise and skill set,” he said, “they’ll be in conversations with classroom, special-education, English as a second language teachers where others can learn from them.

“It’s a work in progress,” he concluded. “It’s powerful.”

The power was evident last Tuesday in the testimonials the board heard.

Meghan Murphy, a fifth-grade teacher at Guilderland Elementary School, recalled how she felt when her first-grade daughter told her, “Mommy, I can’t read.” Murphy said, “My heart broke.”

Murphy said her daughter’s confidence was low and she didn’t believe in herself.

The Reading Recovery program taught her daughter to believe in herself, said Murphy.

Lynnwood’s principal, Alicia Rizzo, said she has been “an unwavering advocate” of Reading Recovery since the late 1990s. She believes relying “on the expertise of teachers, not materials, will solve school problems.”

Rizzo described watching State work with Sophie Smolen and was “in awe” of how much Sophie had learned. She recalled, soon after, seeing Theresa Smolen at a PTA meeting and saying, “’Theresa, oh my God, Sophie’s reading’….We both welled up with tears of joy and relief.”

Other business

In other business at its March 10 meeting, the board:

— Heard from Farnsworth Middle School English teacher Larry Tuxbury about problems with state tests, a “rigged” system, he said, designed to make the majority of students fail, which could result in privatizing public education. “Am I a hypocrite?” Tuxbury asked, concluding he is because he prepares students for the required exams without explaining his misgivings;

— Reviewed policy on English Language Learner proficiency instruction;

— Voted against a request from the town of Bethlehem to grant a tax exemption for landowners that commit to maintaining undeveloped land of five acres or more for at least 15 years;

— Heard congratulations for Alicia Chen, a Guilderland High School senior, who was selected as a candidate for the United States Presidential Scholar program, recognizing seniors for exceptional scholarship and talent in the visual, creative, and performing arts;

— Learned that, in celebration of Youth Art Month, 100 selected student art works are on display through March 20 in the sixth annual K-8 Empire State Plaza Student Art Exhibition;

— Heard that the annual joint meeting between school board members and Guilderland Public Library trustees will be held March 25 at 7 p.m. at the library;

— Heard from Superintendent Marie Wiles that she went to a meeting of the Governing Board of the American Association of School Administrators as one of six representatives of New York State superintendents. The meeting preceded the annual convention of the AASA in San Diego; over 3,000 people attended and heard presentations by educational leaders;

— Learned that the Capital Region Board of Cooperative Educational Services annual budget vote and election will be held on April 21; and

— Met in executive session to discuss tenure and negotiations.