GREEN BAY Wis. — School districts statewide are working to close learning gaps created by the pandemic. Green Bay Area Public Schools have a plan underway to boost academic success.
Last year, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction’s (DPI) report card showed the Green Bay’s School District’s Overall Accountability score of 58.2 met expectations. The DPI’s range for meeting expectations is 58 to 69.9. It was a different story for Green Bay’s Math and English Language Arts (ELA) scores.
Both Green Bay’s Math and ELA Achievement Scores were below the state’s average for 2022-23. The average math score in the district was 40.2 as compared to the state average of 57.2. ELA scores were at 41.5, whereas the state average was 60.1.
The school district wants to improve that. Danz Elementary in Green Bay is piloting a new curriculum that will soon be implemented districtwide.
First-graders are testing the school district’s new kindergarten through eighth-grade curriculum.
Jessica Grahek is the school’s literacy coach. Grahek said this learning change is happening thanks in part to Act 20 Legislation, which states all Wisconsin schools are required to provide science-based early literacy instruction.
“We are shifting towards a more science-of-reading approach, where we are focusing more on phonics and how words and sounds work and language and comprehension, but primarily leading with advanced phonics and phonological awareness,” Grahek said.
Grahek said this means the school district’s new curriculum for grades K-8 will help students learn more complex ways of decoding words and provide reading comprehension strategies. She said so far, the results at Danz Elementary are promising.
“We have seen the highest engagement in our students during their literacy learning that we have seen in years. We have also seen the fastest spike and achievement that we’ve seen in a lot of years,” Grahek said.
David Johns is the associate superintendent for the Green Bay School District. He said while these results are promising, the school district is tempering optimism with patience.
“It’s early… I don’t think anyone who does this work would ever grant a particular curriculum superhuman powers to just change things overnight,” Johns said.
Johns has worked in education for 30 years. In his early days, he said adopting a new districtwide curriculum meant buying a few new books. He said now it is more complicated because it involves a re-education for Green Bay’s educators and students.
“We want our teachers to be able to absorb some new learning and then go right into the classroom and apply it and try to work with it no different than how students learn. The new curriculum is going to challenge all kids because we’re going to give them tools to read at higher and higher levels. But it’s also going to help us close some gaps quicker,” Johns said.
Grahek said what’s going on inside Danz Elementary is particularly encouraging. She said many of these kids, who speak English as a second language, are achieving noticeable learning gains.
“Several students went from nonreaders in English to reading at an end-of-kindergarten level within six weeks. So, they made one year’s worth of progress in six weeks. So they are loving it,” Grahek said.
Correction: A previous version of this story misspelled the last name of David Johns. The error has been corrected. (April 24, 2024)