We just got word that Three Peaks Elementary School, was recently selected as a National Title Distinguished School for 2012.

The Title 1 designation by the U.S. Department of Education is determined by an enrollment of at least 40 percent of students in the free and reduced lunch program. Title 1 schools receive federal funding to improve curriculum, instructional activities, counseling, parental involvement, increase staff and program improvement.

Three Peaks Elementary serves 503 students living in the rural northern area of Iron County, Utah. The percentage of minorities is 12.5 percent and 56.44 percent of the students qualify for free or reduced lunch.

The National Association of State Title I Directors provides an opportunity for Title I schools from every state to be honored for their educational achievements. Each state may select two schools for special recognition at the annual National Title I Conference.

We are especially pleased that Three Peaks Elementary School received this coveted recognition because they use our reading software, Discover Intensive Phonics for Yourself and it's paying off. Three Peaks Elementary achieved 94 percent proficiency in math, and 90 percent proficiency in reading, which is above the state average.

Second Grade Teacher Stacie Reber said the Three Peaks Response to Intervention and Instruction program, that assesses individual student skill, tailors the curriculum to fit the student's needs. "It's not a one-size-fits-all curriculum," Reber said.

Three Peaks Elementary School is just five years old. Their teachers and paraprofessionals have been trained in “Early Steps, Next Steps, and Higher Steps,” by Dr. Kathleen Brown from the University of Utah. Additionally, teachers have been trained to use Discover Intensive Phonics for Yourself in the classroom to help emerging readers and support reading remediation efforts. Monthly Data Teams meet to monitor every at risk student in the school. Adjustments are made to optimize the effectiveness of interventions. Also, a reading specialist works full time with teachers and paraprofessionals teaching, modeling, and monitoring reading instruction.

Congratulations to the administrators, teachers, parents, and students at Three Peaks Elementary!

If you’d like to learn more about helping At Risk Readers, visit our RTI Resource Center>

Earlier this year, Heidi Hyte, Curriculum Manager and ESL Director at Reading Horizons attended the CEC Conference and was honored by being presented the DADD (Division on Autism and Developmental Disabilities, a unit of the Council for Exceptional Children) Practitioner Presentation Award for 2011. Below are excerpts from Heidi’s award-winning presentation.

“As the key that allows access to many forms of knowledge and information, reading literacy is perhaps the skill most critical to learning” (emphasis added).    -The National Assessment of Education Progress

As summarized in the preceding quote, reading is a crucial skill. Because it is so important, the discipline of reading has captured the attention of many researchers. The best approaches to teaching reading, including those put forth by the National Reading Panel (2000), have been investigated.

Educators, in turn, seek the appropriate methods to teach reading. This complex process requires the ability to appropriately orchestrate several different processes to achieve the ultimate goal of reading-comprehension. Struggling readers, however, often lack the foundational skills required to comprehend what they read. Without appropriate intervention, these readers experience alarming consequences.

Research has demonstrated that many struggling readers, including individuals who have dyslexia and developmental disabilities, have trouble breaking words down into letter-sound segments. Naturally, this impedes their reading fluency and comprehension. Research has also revealed, however, that these students “can learn these relationships with intensive phonics training” (Shaywitz, 2003).

Researchers have strongly suggested that students with low reading abilities be explicitly taught phonemic awareness skill and encoding (spelling) strategies that train them to hear sounds and join them to make words.

Explicit training in decoding strategies has been shown to help students develop automatic recognition of phonemic sounds and the graphemes that represent them - a skill that improves reading fluency and comprehension.

Learn more by taking a tour of Reading Horizons Intervention Program>