At the close of the first year of Spring ISD’s five-year Every Child 2020 plan, Superintendent Rodney Watson said the district has worked to improve literacy, resources and curriculum in support of its goal of reaching every student.

SISD developed Every Child 2020 in 2014-15 to address a decline in student achievement in the core areas of reading, math, science and social studies, Watson said.

Watson joined the district in July 2014.

The first year in the plan has been important because the systems and structures put into place this year will provide the foundation for future progress, he said.

Literacy is one of the district’s key commitments under the plan. Watson said the district has begun to address this need through additional training for teachers and principals to bolster educators’ own reading skills. Principals have been receiving advanced literary training in the past year so they can provide additional support for teachers, Watson said.

Another step has been providing books.

“Kids have lost the love of reading,” Watson said.

He said the growing emphasis on testing over the past decade has shifted student attention away from reading for enjoyment.

The 2013-14 STAAR assessment indicated that 40 percent of tested SISD students did not read at their grade levels. In addition, 80 percent of students in kindergarten through second grade who required reading intervention failed to improve by the end of the school year, according to information compiled on the district website.

“When we were young, the only thing we needed to do with a book was to get lost in it and love it; we weren’t preparing for a test,” Watson said.

The district has begun to address this need by providing free books for children throughout the year and setting up Little Free Library stations at every elementary school in the district, allowing students to take and return books at receptacles, Watson said. The district also has partnered with area barbershops to make books available for children while they are waiting for haircuts.

Another part of the student-centered approach is ensuring the recruitment, training and retention of district teachers, Watson said.

The district received a $600,000 grant from the Texas Education Agency this year to expand its pre-K programs in the fall. Elementary schools in the district offer half-day pre-K, except for Lewis Elementary School, which offers a full-day program through a partnership with the nonprofit group AVANCE-Houston. The grant will allow a total of five elementary schools to implement full-day pre-K.

A total of 475 teachers joined the district’s teaching staff this year—a combination of new hires and positions open due to attrition, Watson said. More than 2,500 teachers are employed in the district.

The district also plans to expand a program offered in the Early College Academy which offers opportunities for students to graduate from high school with an associate’s degree. The program will be phased in this fall and fully implemented in the district’s three other comprehensive high schools and the career academy by the 2017-18 school year, SISD Communications Director Karen Garrison said.

The Every Child 2020 plan has four main areas of emphasis, reflecting the goal of reaching every student: excellence in every school, high performance from every employee, opportunities and choice for every family and engaged stakeholders in every community.

The year-long planning process for the plan uncovered a need for a curriculum that was aligned across the grades and schools in the district, Watson said.

“Prior audits show we didn’t have a guaranteed and viable curriculum,” Watson said. “Over the course of the year we rewrote the curriculum for all of our content areas.”

Watson said some evidence of success in the early stages of Every Child 2020 can already be seen in a study carried out during the past school year.

The study carried out by Texas-based data analysis company Education Research Group placed SISD significantly higher in its State Performance Index than it had in the previous year, moving the school from 194th to 152nd place.

“We are moving in the right direction,” Watson said. “Have we arrived? No—but we are making progress to our goal.”