Group Of Educators Headed to South Carolina

Share

By Holly Zuluaga

Summary

The Walla Walla School District gets national recognition for its intervention strategies with teachers now headed to South Carolina to show others how it works.

Story Published: Feb 14, 2010 at 5:15 PM PST

Group Of Educators Headed to South Carolina
WALLA WALLA--The Walla Walla School District gets national recognition for its intervention strategies with teachers now headed to South Carolina to show others how it works.

The hope of RTI or Response to Intervention is to find a good fit for students.

It works like this: students are assessed and put into one of three programs.

Students who are meeting standards are in tier 1.

Students who might need extra help are in tier 2, and students who need more intensive help with a subject are in tier 3.

“That helps us to put systems in place that allow us to find students who might struggle early on in academic areas or behavior and then intervening with those students early and intensively so that more dramatic problems don't develop,” RTI Coordinator Maria Garcia said.

Brittany Eng is in RTI for English and says she's already seeing results.
The class is smaller with lots of group work.

“Our teachers have us work together and we annotate and infer, make inferences together and they pay attention to us like if we're not working they ask if we need help,” Brittany Eng said.

Another thing that Carlos Vazquez likes: having two teachers.

“You can ask questions easier than when there's only one teacher,” Carlos Vazquez said.

Walla Walla High School says it didn't happen overnight.

They've revised the programs, but are sure it's working.

“We have made tremendous increase in growth in reading and writing and I know it's because our efforts we've put in and RTI made this happen. So if you look back to 2003 that's the first year of RTI implementation, we had 52% meeting reading standards. Last year 85%,” Walla Walla High School Associate Principal Mira Gobel said.

Another measure of the program’s success, the Walla Walla School District says it's seen a dramatic drop in the number of kids needing special education for learning disabilities.

It's not just kids that need help.

RTI also helps to challenge advanced students, putting them in the right classes.