When it comes to student literacy, the Wright City R-II School District has undertaken the effort to develop a comprehensive, cohesive blueprint.

At the June meeting of the R-II school board, Assistant Superintendent of Curriculum, Instruction and Assessment Dr. Holly Broadway-Yates outlined the K-12 comprehensive literacy plan and its five-year implementation.

“It’s an MSIP requirement and, sometimes, it’s just easy to check a box and create a plan,” Broadway-Yates said. “This is an important one because literacy is the heart and the backbone of everything we do with our students. It’s really everybody’s work. It’s a K-12 plan that involves parents; it involves community. We wanted to put a lot into this plan.”

Presenting with Broadway-Yates was district resident Dr. Carrie Hepburn, who works at Compass PD, wanted to give back, and has done so by helping the district formulate the literacy plan.

“I met Dr. Hepburn at the Blue and Gold gala last year and she introduced herself to me, said she lives in Wright City and said ‘I want to give back,’” Broadway-Yates said. “She wanted to know how she could support some sort of initiative. We landed on the comprehensive literacy plan. We wanted to have a plan, not just a program, that is (based on) the science of reading that every building in the district shares.”

Broadway-Yates said that the full implementation of the plan will take five to seven years and she and Hepburn outlined the proposed five-year calendar.

There were four leadership team meetings, during which a wide variety of sources were tapped to build a plan that would benefit all students. From teachers to interventionalists to leaders and community members, many different viewpoints were taken into account in building the plan.

“What we love about this plan was that it wasn’t written in isolation, or it wasn’t written by us sitting in a room,” Hepburn said. “This was a plan that was written by multiple stakeholders. This is a requirement of MSIP-6 that you’re required to do without extra funding. Rather than treating this as a compliance, Wright City developed a plan.”

In building the literacy plan, it was determined that the district already had a strong Science of Reading foundation in early grades; a common, rigorous core elementary ELA curriculum that teachers and students respond to; and a partnership with the Missouri Reading Initiative at the middle school level that has been beneficial and is expanding to high school.

In building the plan, it was determined that a handful of growth areas needed to be addressed.

Among those were family engagement and school-to-home communication around literacy; staff retention and onboarding new staff into our literacy systems; screening consistency and reducing over-testing, and K–12 vertical alignment and consistency across buildings — the team's most-cited need.

With the foundation built in year one of the curriculum build, this school year will be a more earnest building of all the literacy systems the district needs.

Years No. 3-5 will then see efforts to deepen and sustain the plan.

“This is the Wright City literacy plan built by your team and your people,” Hepburn said. “Your people spent a significant amount of time, reading, studying, researching, asking hard questions and analyzing data to build this plan for our students.”