BISD board discusses literacy, mathematics goals progress

The Breckenridge ISD school board met last Monday to discuss progress made by the district’s pre-kindergarten through third grade students. Prairie Freeman, BISD’s Chief Learning Officer, discussed Texas House Bill 3 and how the district is ensuring compliance with the new standards set by the bill.

According to the Texas Education Agency, HB 3 requires school boards to adopt and monitor early childhood literacy and mathematics proficiency plans and ensure the use of a systematic phonics curriculum.

“For House Bill 3, we have our beginning of the year progress measures. We’ve set a goal, an overall goal, that I guess we brought to you guys last year, and y’all approved. We have a literacy goal and then we have a math goal, so two separate goals,” Freeman said.

BISD has implemented four progress measures which it uses for both math and reading, according to Freeman. Progress measure one relates to pre-K students; progress measure two relates to kindergarten students; progress measure three relates to both first and second grade students; and progress measure four relates to third grade students.

Reading
Pre-K students are assessed by a program called CIRCLE Progress Monitor. They are assessed at the beginning, middle, and end of the school year. Freeman said students did not meet their first assessment goal.
“We had 59% on-track for the progress monitor. Our goal for the end of the year is 76% of our pre-K students will be on-track. So we’ve got some work to do there, but we will be monitoring that as we go,” she said. “I think with what Barbara (Collingsworth) has put in place, with the progress monitoring every four weeks and their RTI (Response to Intervention), I think that’s going to help.”

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