March 29, 2024

Berg Middle School developing plan to stay off SINA list

Scott Bauer said his staff is fired up and ready to do whatever it can to help to help Berg Middle School get off of the Iowa Department of Education’s School in Need of Assistance list for reading.

Bauer, Berg Middle School principal, made this declaration at Monday’s Newton Community School District Board of Education meeting as his building played host for the bi-monthly meeting.

BMS was listed as a SINA-9 school in reading, but the building did make it off of the SINA list for math this year and is currently at delay status. A school can be labeled SINA if it doesn’t make adequate yearly progress or fails to meet select annual measurable objectives on the Iowa Assessments.

Prior to this year, BMS was labeled SINA-7 in math. With the building starting to make progress in that area, Bauer said the challenge now for them is to expand its efforts to raising reading scores. In order to do so, he enlisted Deb Rose, BMS instructional coach, and Cara Schwarz, a BMS English/language arts teacher, to help create the school’s SINA Action Plan.

“In reading we still needed assistance. So that’s where our SINA plan focuses on,” Bauer said.

The SINA team has been working with the Area Education Agency to research ways to get the school off of the SINA list in reading. Janelle Thompson, an AEA literacy curriculum consultant, has been key to this plans development and has helped develop long term and short term goals for the building, Bauer said.

“At SINA training or ‘SINA School’ as we like to call it, the big question is, ‘what do we do?’” Rose said.

One solution was better implementation of a multi-tiered system of support or MTSS, Rose said. BMS would use the MTSS model, along with a continuous improvement process, to help implement English/language arts lessons into all content areas. The school wants to have teachers speaking a common language, while teaching various subject areas.

“You can’t expect kids just to learn to read in English — they read in all of it,” Rose said.

BMS also wants to implement a number of testing metrics to track students’ progress throughout the school year. This way teachers can spot a student who is struggling quickly and see if a literacy intervention is necessary,

Rose stressed getting the school off of this list wasn’t going to be an overnight process and that it would take time.

The plan itself is still being tweaked by the BMS staff after the school’s SINA team presented it to the group during Monday’s professional development day. Bauer said once a final version is complete, it would be implemented.

“I had to remind myself that this is a long term plan, because of the excitement that the teachers had to take ownership to this. The question I got, ‘what can I do in my classroom tomorrow to help with this?’” Bauer said.

“That’s what’s exciting that teachers are ready to jump on board and do this. Now it’s trying to do this the right way and with fidelity and making sure we are doing this with long term success in mind.”

Contact Ty Rushing at 641-792-3121 ext. 6532 or trushing@newtondailynews.com