West Holmes brings teachers together for LETRS day
Michelle Rawson, kindergarten teacher at Millersburg Elementary is hard at work progressing through the second out of eight series in the LETRS training program.
On Friday, March 31, West Holmes Schools kindergarten through third-grade students didn’t have to attend school.
Conversely, their teachers did, as part of a comprehensive district plan to incorporate LETRS training throughout the district’s younger grades. Thus, the entire district staff from K-3 gathered at Nashville Elementary to pursue the united effort to go through the LETRS program.
According to Brian Baughman, West Holmes Schools curriculum director, LETRS (Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling) is a comprehensive, very intense special development program that takes teachers through the beginnings of the science of reading from the early stages of trying to recognize sounds all the way through reading comprehension and understanding the words on a page.
“Our literacy committee met prior to (the pandemic) and one of the things we wanted to do was invest in some professional development,” Baughman said. “We’ve had a lot of teachers who have had a lot of training, and some of the things we do and have done for a long time are already incorporated, but we wanted some consistency and terminology with everyone on the same page.”
COVID-19 hit and slowed down the process, but now with school back in full swing for the entire year, the district felt it was time to push the LETRS program hard when the state passed a dyslexia law that required hours of training for kindergarten through third-grade teachers and all K-12 special education teachers.
“LETRS not only satisfied the law, but it gives our teachers quality training tools that will make our district better and help kids, which is why we chose to go this route,” Baughman said.
LETRS is a professional learning course for instructors of reading, spelling, and related language skills. It provides educators with in-depth knowledge and tools teachers can use with any reading program. LETRS helps educators understand how students learn to read and write, recognize the reasons why some students struggle, and determine what must be taught to increase student success.
The LETRS series is extensive, requiring a great deal of study as it progresses through a lengthy series of videos. Thus, the district decided to bring all of the teachers who are investing in the program together for a workshop day at Nashville the day before spring break.
“I give our teachers a lot of credit,” Baughman said. “This is important to them and they’re working hard at it, and we want to support them any way we can.”
Baughman said the literacy committee and the district spent a long time exploring a variety of options on how to best get the district involved in adhering to new laws. LETRS has been one of the most utilized programs and Baughman said the committee realized there was a reason for that.
That led to bringing the district’s qualifying staff members to Nashville, where they met early and late in the day as a group and divided up into small units in rooms throughout the school. Because teachers are all in various journeys on their path to completing the LETRS program, the committee tried to pair them up with other individuals who were working on similar parts of the program. LETRS is a self-paced program in which teachers can go at a pace that works for them, the only stipulation being that they get it done in a two-year window.
“We wanted this to be more than sitting and watching videos, we wanted to provide an avenue for teachers to come together and talk about what’s working and what isn’t working,” Baughman said.
He said that the goal was to encourage everyone to have unit two of the eight-unit set completed by the May 12 personal development day, with a goal of having a live, in-person training leader available that day.
As teachers worked through LETRS at their own pace, with most of them being anywhere from the first to third units, Lindsey Beachy, second-grade teacher at Killbuck Elementary, was busy winding down her eighth and final unit.
“It’s a program that really ties things together, and once you get started on one unit you want to keep going to finish it, and it builds on itself, so I decided to just keep it going rather than splitting it up,” Beachy said.
She added that much of what LETRS provides is already being done district wide, which she said was encouraging.
“The more I got into it, the more I realized that we are doing much of what is there, so it’s good to know that we’re already on the right track,” Beachy said. “This is simply new and interesting ideas and strategies to try out.”
Toby Yoder, WH Schools literacy coach and committee member, said seeing the staff work through the task at hand has been inspiring and the school district administration is also working through this to gain better insight into what the teachers are going through.
“This is going to elevate us as a district,” Yoder said.
The administrative modules are more geared toward developing ways a district can aid its teachers as they work through LETRS.
“Our teachers have been really great at making this a focus and setting aside time to dig into it, and we realize it isn’t easy,” Baughman said. “They’ve been phenomenal, and our staff in general is incredible and they want to be better for the community, and that isn’t the case everywhere.”
For West Holmes Schools superintendent Eric Jurkovic, watching his team tackle the task at hand has been wonderful to watch, and he said this is a big deal for any district to unite and work toward completing one common goal.
“We have four different communities in the district, but we’re all here to benefit the kids,” Jurkovic said. “It’s amazing to see our teachers come together and share together. They’ve dove into this with passion.”