District campaign aims to make Springdale community of readers

SPRINGDALE -- Elementary schools in the fall will make sure pupils have 20 to 30 minutes each school day to read books, and a new campaign by the district aims to promote reading across the community.

Facebook posts for school events this spring and summer have been tagged with #springdalereads. Billboards on Pleasant Street near Wal-Mart Supercenter feature Mayor Doug Sprouse and football coaches Zak Clark and Chris Wood as part of a new reading campaign from the School District.

Springdale School District wants parents to post pictures of them reading with their children on social media sites, such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, and tag them with #springdalereads, said Kathy Morledge, assistant superintendent for kindergarten through fifth-grade instruction.

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"Anything we can do to get kids to read," Morledge said. "We want Springdale to be known as a community of readers."

The centerpiece of "Springdale Reads" is a reading curriculum Shaw and Sonora elementary schools piloted in the spring semester. Teachers, administrators and instructional specialists from the other elementary campuses are training in preparation of the new curriculum's implementation this fall.

Attention on literacy is part of the work happening in the Springdale School District because of its selection as one of five Forward Arkansas communities, Morledge said. Each community chose a focus. Four selected college and career preparation, a topic that has received attention in the district. Springdale chose reading, she said.

Forward Arkansas is a partnership of the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation and the Arkansas State Board of Education. Their vision is to help every Arkansas student graduate prepared for success in college and the workplace. A steering committee has developed recommendations for closing student achievement gaps and for making Arkansas a leading state in education, according to the Forward Arkansas website.

The city will be recognized this week at the The Campaign for Grade-Level Reading national conference in Denver, she said. Springdale is among 48 communities, including Marvel, named a 2016 Pacesetter community. Springdale was named a Pacesetter community because of strategies schools are using to reduce chronic absences.

The Springdale School District also is highlighted for acting as a coordinator of grade-level reading work among other nearby districts, community organizations and funding groups, according to the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading website.

Springdale also is among 27 finalists for the 2017 the All-America City Award by The Campaign for Grade-Level Reading and the National Civic League. Award recipients will be named Friday. The All-America recognition stems from progress in children being ready for school, school attendance, summer learning and overall grade-level reading.

The communitywide attention on reading builds on the "OneCommunity Reads, UnaComunidad Leyendo!" program started in 2013, said Diana Gonzales Worthen, chairwoman and co-founder of the OneCommunity nonprofit group. The program aims to develop a culture of reading among Springdale School District families, including where Spanish and Marshallese are spoken at home.

Parents sometimes think they can't read to their children if they aren't fluent in English, Worthen said. The OneCommunity program encourages parents to read books written in their native language to their children and for children to read books in English to their parents.

When parents read books in their native language, children see and hear their native language, she said. When the children read, they are building English language skills, and their parents see and hear English.

"Those literacy skills transfer," Worthen said.

A campaign for the broader community will bring reading to the forefront, she said.

"We're all working on the same page," she said. "It's all about moving our kids forward."

The new elementary reading program in Springdale is designed around a daily readers workshop. The Units of Study for Teaching Reading is based on decades of research by Lucy Calkins, founding director of the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project at Columbia University, and her colleagues.

Shaw Principal Cynthia Voss said she has noticed a change in student motivation toward reading since piloting the district's new reading program. Teachers give a short lesson to begin reading instruction and close with a time for students to share, but the majority of the time is dedicated to students reading, Voss said. The school has added books to classroom libraries and to the books in the school library, Voss said. Students have choices in what they read.

"We talk books a lot," Voss said. "We always have, but nothing like we have since we started allowing kids to choose their own and since we've had enough books."

The emphasis on reading means schools will need more books, Morledge said. Beginning readers will need 10 to 12 picture books a week, while more advanced readers may read two to three books a week of varying size.

The reading campaign also ties in with summer reading programs across the district and at Springdale Public Library, Morledge said. Some campuses open the school library over the summer, while others have mobile libraries that take books to children.

Morledge's advice for stopping the loss of student learning that commonly happens over the summer is for children to read six to 12 books on their summer break, she said. She encourages parents to find out about their school library programs over the summer.

"Just have those kids read and play," Morledge said. "Kids need to be active."

NW News on 06/15/2017