School Board Hears Update on Secondary ELA Pilot

At a recent meeting, Dr. Bobbie Kilgore, Director of Teaching and Learning, provided the Milford School District Board of Education an update on the Secondary English Language Arts (ELA) Pilot program. Kilgore explained that her department had spent the entire year reviewing the secondary curriculum for ELA.

“Starting in September, we put out a call for anybody who was interested in being part of the pilot and had teachers representing all three of our schools, so the Middle School, Central Academy and Milford High School,” Kilgore said. “We had teachers, staff and specialists who all volunteered and we were able to take anyone who had an interest to join the committee.”

Kilgore explained that they began by reviewing historical data to see if they actually needed to pilot a program or continue with the current curriculum. The committee chose to undergo a review process.

“I asked the committee to come up with a list of non-negotiables,” Kilgore said. “What kinds of things do we need for our students to ensure that we’re going to meet their needs moving forward? We looked at the curriculum that the state said was available in Delaware and narrowed it down based on the non-negotiables.”

The non-negotiables set by the committee required the curriculum to include writing and that it have multi-language learning supports embedded. They also felt scaffolding with multi-level supports were necessary. The program had to include complete and interesting literature, literature that culturally represented the student body, literature that included classics and incorporated full text as well as passages as they would appear in testing situations. Additional non-negotiable requirements were included in a slide presented to the board.

“When we actually sat down and reviewed the curriculum, we had five different options for the committee to look at,” Kilgore said. “They graded them with a rubric which narrowed it down to two different curriculums. On December 5, we had presentations from two different vendors.”

The two vendors, SAVVAS and HMH, both had positive aspects. SAVVAS had high student engagement, clear lesson structure, accessible and meaningful texts, alignment to standards, appropriate pacing and strong student discourse. Benefits with HMH included clear lesson structure, high student engagement, accessible and meaningful texts, strong student discourse, effective differentiation supports, appropriate pacing and accurate assessments.

A survey of teachers who were included in the pilot found that 72.7 percent felt HMH provided better student outcomes while 72.7 percent recommended using HMH. When it came to cost effectiveness. HMH received overwhelming support from teachers at 90.9 percent. Therefore, the committee recommended the board adopt HMH as the secondary ELA curriculum. It was not an action item on the board agenda, so the board will vote at a future meeting.