• Category 3

    Selected in 2020

  • Grades: pre k - pre k
    School Setting: rural
    Town Population: 9,700
    Student Enrollment: 482
    Student Demographics:

    Black/African American: 0%
    White/Caucasian: 77%
    Hispanic: 15%
    Hawaiian/Pacific Islander: 2%
    Asian: 0%
    Native American: 3%
    Other: 3%

    Teacher/Student Ratio: 1:24
    % Reduced Lunch: 60%
    % ELL Learners: 6%
    Founded: 1961
  • PRINCIPAL:
    Carrie Weldon
  • CONTACT:
    350 North 1150 West St.
    Vernal, UT 84078
    435-781-3170
    carrie.weldon@uintah.net
Ashley Elementary School
Vernal, UT
Schools should always be about what’s best for students and what improves student learning.
Describe specific programs in place to ensure that families are involved in the success of your school and students.
We hold public Community Council meetings monthly. In the past, we have held school carnivals and parent reading/art nights although those have been postponed due to COVID19. We have a yearly back to school night and several parent teacher conference weeks when parents can meet with teachers and discuss concerns and student progress. Our ELL outreach program through Griselda Quintero is also an essential and important part of our parent interaction.
Describe the most successful activity your school has initiated to strengthen ties to your community.
A few years ago, I was concerned about our outreach to our Spanish speaking parents. Because of the language barrier, strange rumors abounded concerning what happened at school and what happened in school programs like special education and reading interventions. I hired Griselda Quintero to be a reading tutor and an ELL aide. Because Gris was a native Spanish speaker, I started using her to contact parents who did not speak English. She became their lifeline to the school. The parents contacted her with any concerns and questions about school, and she soon dispelled rumors floating through the Spanish speaking community. When schools shut down in March due to COVID19, Gris made sure to reach out to our Spanish speaking families. She helped them check out computers, answered their questions and concerns about lessons and computers, and even went to their homes when computers crashed. Our Spanish speaking families feel more connected to our school community because of Griselda.
Describe your philosophy of school change or improvement.
Schools should always be about what’s best for students and what improves student learning. When our reading assessment and data program, Easy CBM, was not giving our teachers and me the data we needed to track student progress, I changed our program to DIBELS and instigated monthly progress monitoring data reviews at PLCs. When I saw that our ELL students were not progressing, I did what I could to improve our ELL program. When our reading program was not meeting the needs of our students, I changed the structure of it and added an intensive interventions program for our poorest readers. When our Tier One instruction was not teaching almost half of our students to read at grade level by third grade, I brought LETRS to our campus to improve reading instruction. I will keep pushing to change things until 90% of our students are reading at grade level by third grade. That’s my promise to my students to make their lives richer and better through reading.
What are your school’s top two goals for the next year?
According to DIBELS data, 50% of our students will read at grade level by the end of the 20/21 school year (up from 41% reading at grade level in fall of 2020). 15 of our 26 ELL students will read at grade level by the end of the 20/21 school year ( up from 11 reading at grade level in fall of 2020). 10 of the 13 ELL students reading Well Below Grade Level at BOY 20/21 will either be at grade level or approaching grade level by EOY 20/21.
What is the single most important factor in the success of your school that others could replicate?
Other schools could replicate our ELL program. You should choose a person who speaks the predominant language and who can communicate the parents in their primary language. You should fund an hour of ELL aide time for each student identified as needing instruction. Base your program on English oral and reading vocabulary acquisition and oral/reading/written sentence structure. Our intervention program is also replicable. It's based on the CORE phonics assessment and using research-based instructional strategies to fill in instructional gaps in student's reading. Also, our data protocols and unit cycle protocols are replicable.
Describe the program or initiative that has had the greatest positive effect on student achievement, including closing achievement or opportunity gaps, if applicable.
Three years ago, I had just received one student from Peru who spoke no English, and I had eleven students who had scored a one or a two in the WIDA test who were receiving almost no language instruction. The district ELL coordinator could only find me ½ hour a week of instruction for all of my students. This wasn’t enough. I had a reading aide, Griselda Quintero, who was a native Spanish speaker. I asked if she could work an extra 10 hours with our ELL students to help them improve their English reading and writing skills. Then I approached the district ELL director and asked if he would fund 10 hours for my aide to work with my ELL students. He agreed. We pulled instructional materials from all over the district. With that we started our new ELL program. We saw immediate growth. In fact, my student who came to us as a non-English speaker tested out of our ELL program after two years. The program has been so successful, it has been copied at every school in our district.
Explain how ESEA federal funds are used to support your improvement efforts.
Title 1 funds pay for my ELL aide and ELL instructional materials. They also fund my reading intervention program. I pay for four reading intervention aides and reading intervention materials from Title 1 funds. I also pay for family outreach programs through my Title 1 funds.
Identify the critical professional development activities you use to improve teaching and student learning.
Bringing DIBELS to our school was the first big change I made and training teachers on how to use the data to improve instruction and interventions put us on the path to improve students' ability to read. Creating data protocols, having teachers create instructional unit cycles, and use PLC time to go through data protocols has improved our instruction and student learning. The big step was bringing LETRS to our district and school to improve Tier One and Tier Two instruction for students. I'm anticipating that this will have a big impact on our instruction. I have already seen changes in lessons from what teachers are learning from LETRS.
Describe how data is used to improve student achievement and inform decision making.
Three years ago, I noticed that twenty percent of our students referred to our Student Intervention Team were ELL students. I wanted to see what the data was saying about our ELL population and why were teachers arguing that so many of our ELL students needed special education services. I created a group on my DIBELS Amplify dashboard of all of my ELL students. What I saw was that my ELL students, especially my students who scored a 1 or a 2 on the WIDA test were not growing in reading. I started to closely track those students on Amplify. I also implemented a protocol where teachers had to look at the DIBELS progress monitoring data once a month and address the needs of students who were not growing at all or were growing too slowly. We also have protocols where we look at data weekly during grade level PLCs in math and/or reading in order to intervene better when students are not mastering skills.
Describe your school culture and explain changes you’ve taken to improve it.
Our school population is changing and our culture with it. We have increased our free/reduced lunch population by 15% in the last five years. Also, our level of students not reading on grade level has increased by about 30%. We have had to take some measures to combat this. One of the things I keep telling our staff is that there are no sacred cows. We needed to analyze all of our instructional practices to get more kids reading at grade level. Several years ago, we implemented a radical reading intervention program where we targeted our lowest 20% of readers with interventions. We continued to refine and improve this program; however, we still have too many kids who do not read on grade level. This year all of our teachers have started the LETRS professional development program to help bolster our reading Tier One instruction. I am already seeing changes in instruction, and teachers are excited about trying new instructional approaches. The changes have reinvigorated our staff.
Stats
  • Category 3

    Selected in 2020

  • Grades: pre k - pre k
    School Setting: rural
    Town Population: 9,700
    Student Enrollment: 482
    Student Demographics:

    Black/African American: 0%
    White/Caucasian: 77%
    Hispanic: 15%
    Hawaiian/Pacific Islander: 2%
    Asian: 0%
    Native American: 3%
    Other: 3%

    Teacher/Student Ratio: 1:24
    % Reduced Lunch: 60%
    % ELL Learners: 6%
    Founded: 1961
  • PRINCIPAL:
    Carrie Weldon
  • CONTACT:
    350 North 1150 West St.
    Vernal, UT 84078
    435-781-3170
    carrie.weldon@uintah.net