Eugene and Pleasant Hill School Districts, Oregon

Both school districts are addressing the need to improve reading and prevent reading failure. The districts are working toward the state and nationally identified goal that every child be able to read by grade three. Phonemic awareness, according to the Linking Agent, was chosen as a means to prevent unnecessary referral to special education and to assure that those referred truly need such services. Previous to this intervention, many teachers did not explicitly teach phonics and instead concentrated on whole language. The Linking Agent observed that sometimes, by grade two, a discrepancy appears between achievement and reading, resulting in a child receiving the label of learning disabled. Through the Phonemic Awareness intervention, the Linking Agent hopes to prevent many of these kinds of referrals.

An administrator from Eugene, Oregon indicated that once every seven years the schools must adopt a new basal reading series. They looked at the state and district recommendations but felt that all of the programs started too high. They also observed that there were serious gaps, in particular in regards to phonemic awareness. For this reason, many children were not ready to read. When they heard about the phonemic awareness program, they contacted the Linking Agent to explore the possibility of implementing that intervention in their school.

The Collaborative Strategic Reading (CSR) intervention was initiated in one school about three years ago. This approach involves instruction in four reading comprehension strategies, and it integrated with cooperative learning. Children of varying abilities are placed in heterogeneous cooperative groups of four to six students who use the strategies and help one another understand the text. CSR, according to the LA, has resulted in improved reading, and increased participation among students in the resource room. "Sometimes I'm surprised at how well these kids are doing at implementing these complicated strategies," said the LA in an interview in the Spring of 2001. In the coming school year the teacher who is using this approach will be moving to a new school along with his principal, and they hope to involve additional teachers in implementing this intervention.

In addition, this year the linking agent worked with the curriculum coordinator to form a cadre of trainers to train other teachers regarding literacy, reading comprehension, and differentiated instruction. This group consists of grade 3-8 teachers from various schools. The linking agent has formed three strands within the cadres: explicit strategies, differentiated instruction, and scaffolded instruction. Each strand has a leader and seven additional trainers who are self-selected. When a school calls, if the linking agent is not available, he sends a trainer from the appropriate strand.
The two school districts have been involved in a number of research-based interventions since they began working with EMSTAC. This year, they continue with one PALS school in Eugene, one phonemic awareness school in Pleasant Hill and four in Eugene. In addition, one school is working on CSI.

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