D60 Reading Director Says Program Working
By John Norton, The Pueblo Chieftain, Colo.
Feb. 21–One thing that Lindamood-Bell reading specialists feel strongly about is all children have the potential to learn to read.
Owen Main, the company’s project director for Pueblo’s School District 60, told members of Pueblo Rotary 43 Monday that Pueblo is the flagship for his company’s school services division.
Lindamood-Bell, based in San Luis Obispo, Calif., began as an institute that researched ways to improve reading and offered what Main said were “relatively expensive” clinics for youngsters with reading problems.
Realizing that there were a lot of children who needed the help but couldn’t afford it, the company decided to set up a school service division that would be funded by school districts.
His mother worked for the firm and Main said he grew up as “guinea pig,” later joining the company as an employee.
District 60 adopted the the Lindamood-Bell program in 1998 and at first had a number of the company’s specialists working in local schools. Since then, the district has trained its own staff members – 34 are now certified and working at 32 schools – and Main is the only employee of the corporation still working in Pueblo.
District 60 paid the company $150,000 for the current school year, $25,000 less than the previous school year and the number has been dropping steadily as Pueblo teachers take over more of the work.
Keith Owen, who oversees the program, said that most of the cost is funded by Title VII money that pays for bilingual education, special education grants and Title I programs for low-income neighborhood schools.
Even though many of the Title I school teachers are trained in Lindamood-Bell processes, Main stressed that reading problems span income, race and other divisions.
Initial screenings of District 60 students determine whether children are having trouble learning to read. If that’s the case, specialists with Lindamood-Bell training do their own diagnosis to learn if the problem is related to their ability to recognize words, like dyslexia, or if comprehension is the trouble.
Main said that the children who have trouble recognizing words are the easiest to spot and often have good comprehension skills. They can follow oral instruction well but can’t figure out the written word. That is the more numerous group.
On the other had, there are children who can read aloud flawlessly but not understand what they’d just read.
Those are the ones who are harder to catch but when the screening points them out, the program can deal with those skills, too.
The main philosophy of the program is that every child has the potential to read at his or her grade level, he said. “And the facilitators at our schools really believe that. They’ll give you an argument if you say differently.”
The numbers tend to bear that out, he added, pointing out that since 2000, District 60′s third grade Colorado Student Assessment Program reading scores have been above the state average, something unexpected in a district with Pueblo’s income levels.
Since 1998, the program has worked with about 7,500 children, he said and 90 percent of the district’s staff has received training.
About 1,500 students go through the program in a given year.
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Copyright (c) 2006, The Pueblo Chieftain, Colo.
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