Friday FYI

A West Contra Costa Unified School District e-update
November 2, 2001 * No. 0102-9

New leadership team at Kennedy hits the ground running

A great school is created not by individuals, but by a great team that involves students, families, teachers, support staff, administrators, and the community, said Kennedy High School Principal Julio Franco at a reception held on October 18 in the school's cafeteria. At the reception Mr. Franco introduced members of the faculty, support staff, and administrative team to the community. The reception was held to welcome Mr. Franco and Assistant Principal Jerrold Scheidt as the newest members of Kennedy's administrative team.

"I'm alive and kicking," Mr. Franco said recently, during a breather between meetings in his office. "For the first three weeks I've been looking at systems, and tightening things up," he said. "Now we're focusing on academics."

The Literacy Corner

One of the recommendations of the National Reading Panel (NRP) is that "[T]eachers must themselves be educated about how to evaluate different programs to determine which ones are based on strong evidence and how they can most effectively use these programs in their own classrooms."

The NRP goes on to say that "[I]t is therefore important that teachers be provided with evidence-based pre-service training and ongoing in-service training to select (or develop) and implement the most appropriate phonics instruction effectively."

With that in mind, the NRP report provides some definitions that should help our schools start this process by allowing principals, teachers, and trainers to identify the type of phonics instruction in the programs they have selected or are considering. Once identified, teachers can then use the NRP recommendations to match an appropriate form of instruction to their students' needs. Here are some definitions:

Synthetic phonics: Teaching students explicitly to convert letters into sounds (phonemes) and then blend the sounds to form recognizable words

Analytic phonics: Teaching students to analyze letter-sound relations in previously learned words to avoid pronouncing sounds in isolation

Embedded phonics: Teaching students phonics skills by embedding phonics instruction in text reading, a more implicit approach that relies to some extent on incidental learning

Analogy phonics: Teaching students unfamiliar words by analogy to known words (e.g., learning to read "brick" by recognizing that -ick is contained in the known word "kick")

The above approaches may be provided systematically or incidentally, and here are definitions for those terms:

Systematic phonics: Teaching students a sequential set of phonics elements that is delineated and taught in varying degrees of explicitness, depending on the type of phonics method employed.

By contrast, in incidental phonics, the teacher does not follow a planned sequence of phonics elements to guide instruction, but highlights particular elements opportunistically when they appear in text.

-Barbara Adams

Next week: The approaches recommended by the National Reading Panel for children in varying grade levels, children with disabilities, and children of low socioeconomic status.

Halloween brings out witches, princesses, superheroes, and assorted personas

Caption: After their parade, Dover School students flocked to the Haunted House created by Maribel Aguirre of Healthy Start. "I usually have a Haunted House at my home," said Ms. Aguirre, who lives near the school. "But I decided to do it at the school so that the students would have a safe activity." Ms. Aguirre transformed the Healthy Start room into two tours-one for primary children and a scarier one for older students.

Elementary schools held their traditional Halloween parades on Wednesday, bringing a celebratory and carnival-like atmosphere to their surrounding communities.

Led by their teachers, who themselves were bedecked in fanciful costumes, young students throughout the district marched around the playyards, cheered on by adoring parents, families, and relatives.

Ellerhorst School in Pinole was typical of other district schools in the way a morning parade was held for kindergarten classes, followed by the grand parade at 1:00 p.m. for grades 1-6. Students were joined by members of the Pinole Valley High School Marching Band, who were also in costume. Principal Katherine Burgardt (above) - as the Queen of Hearts from Alice In Wonderland - led the entourage. Ms. Burgardt made the costume herself, said School Secretary Ginny Perry. Fortunately for Ms. Burgardt, Ms Perry is also a seamstress. "Between my suggestions for making shortcuts and her talent, she got it done," Ms. Perry said.

Measure M bond update

The Measure M Bond management team has completed site visits to approximately half of the district's elementary schools, with the remaining tours taking place the week of November 5. Other activities during this phase include:

Learning Village events: pass it on.

The next Multilingual District Advisory Committee takes place on November 15,2001 at the Grant School Auditorium 2400 Downer Avenue in Richmond. Information will be shared by the Student Welfare and Attendance team, and training will be offered for English Learner Advisory Committee (ELAC) members. ELAC is the school-based committee for English Learner issues.

Do you have an item for our next Friday FYI that's related to one of our strategic priorities? E-mail it to: pehara@ wccusd.k12.ca.us. Of course, if you're on the district's GroupWise network, you can just send it to us that way.

Our strategic priorities are: 1) Student Achievement (attendance), 2) Safety (behavior), 3) Personnel Training and Professional Development, 4) Facilities, 5) Family and Community Partnerships, 6) Equity, and 7) Communication.

-Paul Ehara, managing editor