Academy's focus is on phonics

Heather Mead took drastic action when her son, Holden, fell behind in reading.

By the end of first grade, Holden was a year behind his classmates in the Millard Public Schools. He was losing confidence; she was losing patience.

“I just thought, ‘This is not OK to not be able to read as you go through life,'” Mead said.

The solution she discovered for Holden has caught the interest of the Learning Community Council as a potential tool to improve achievement by impoverished children in inner-city Omaha.

Mead pulled Holden out of his Millard school and enrolled him full time at the Phoenix Academy Day School, a private school in Omaha that treats reading problems with a heavy dose of intensive phonics instruction.

This summer, the Learning Community Council has paid to send 34 low-income students from northeast Omaha to summer school at the west Omaha academy. It's an intense three-week regimen of math and reading, though far shorter than the typical stay.

Academy students often spend one or two years at Phoenix before returning to their former school.

Within three months, Mead noticed a change in her son. One night she discovered Holden reading in bed. She asked him why, and he answered: “Because I can.” In one year at Phoenix, Holden advanced two grade levels in reading, his mother said.

The Learning Community's $16,935 grant for Phoenix tuition and transportation is one of 13 summer pilot projects launched by the education cooperative.

The 34 children are being tested before and after to gauge their progress. If council members are pleased with the results, the school could factor into Learning Community plans in high-poverty pockets of the Omaha metropolitan area. The Legislature created the Learning Community of Douglas and Sarpy Counties in 2007 to try to improve academic achievement by disadvantaged children.

The Phoenix Academy, tucked away in Rockbrook Village near 108th Street and West Center Road, is truly “old school” in its approach.

Students won't find colorful wall hangings or inspirational posters like in a typical elementary school classroom — too distracting, teachers say. Walls are stark. Desks are arranged in neat, straight rows facing forward — no cozy clusters or circles. Teachers keep kids on task.

“Pencils down. Eyes are on me,” teacher Betsy Schultz tells her pupils. “Let's sound it out with me: Cah.”

At Phoenix, kids learn to read, write and spell with Spalding Phonics.

Once kids know the 72 basic letters and letter combinations, called phonograms, and the rules that govern them, they can assemble those sounds into syllables and words.

Instruction involves lots of repetition, said Phoenix teacher Kael Sagheer.

Spalding Phonics is also used at Central Park Elementary School, one of 62 elementary schools in the Omaha Public Schools.

The Millard district uses Spalding as a supplemental reading program in its Core Academy at Willa Cather Elementary School. The Core Academy is a small magnet program where instruction focuses on the core areas of reading, writing and math.

American educators pushed phonics aside in the 1980s and 1990s in favor of the “whole language” approach, a sort of immersion philosophy that focused on reading for meaning and exposure to literature. It's sometimes called sight reading, or simply memorization. But whole language suffered a setback after California adopted it and test scores plummeted.

A National Reading Panel, which Congress created in the late 1990s to evaluate the best techniques for teaching reading, confirmed the benefits of “systematic phonics instruction.” Since then, many districts have adopted “balanced literacy,” which incorporates elements of both whole language and phonics.

Advocates for phonics say the method can be especially effective for disadvantaged children, who are not exposed to books and vocabulary-rich conversations at home.

Critics of phonics say that the method is too rote and repetitive and does little to develop comprehension — and that many kids can learn to read without it.

Sherri Sommer agrees that not every kid needs phonics. She is teaching summer school at Phoenix Academy. She also teaches at Central Park Elementary. She says it works for many kids, though she was initially skeptical. In graduate school, Sommer wrote a paper criticizing phonics. She became a believer in 2001, after receiving training in Spalding at Central Park, which is near 42nd Street and Grand Avenue.

“I was humbled,” she said.

Sommer now teaches like a cheerleader, punching her fists to emphasize letter sounds.

Former OPS board member Ann Mactier used her own money to provide a grant to bring Spalding to Central Park. Although nearly all the students attending Central Park live in poverty, they ranked high on last spring's California Achievement Test. They outscored most of their counterparts in OPS as well as nationwide. Among other high-poverty OPS schools, none did as well as Central Park.

Mary Austin, principal at Central Park, said the root of the children's success is phonics. Austin said that when she first got to the school, sixth-graders could not spell the word “of.”

“They spelled it ‘u-v'. I was like, ‘Are you kidding me?'” Austin said.

“What phonics does for you is it not only helps you read and decode, it helps you spell,” she said.

Justin Wayne, who represents east-central and north Omaha on the Learning Community Council, said Central Park's success can't be ignored.

“Those types of programs should be duplicated throughout the whole of OPS,” said Wayne, who is running for a seat on the OPS board.

OPS is implementing a new K-2 reading program next year that will give students some daily phonics instruction, said Donna Dobson, OPS director of elementary education.

Although Journeys, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, will be the district's core reading program, individual schools may still adopt supplemental programs such as Spalding, she said.

Learning Community Council Chairman Rick Kolowski said that if the techniques used by Phoenix are shown to work, they could be incorporated into the council's plans for its learning centers serving high-poverty neighborhoods. The first two centers will serve north Omaha, South Omaha and Bellevue. However, no detailed proposals have yet been developed.

In the meantime, Phoenix Academy will continue its role as a backstop for area schools.

Nancy Lieberman, director of Phoenix Academy, said her school has accepted children from every metro-area district, parochial schools and even from out of state.

“Maybe the kid who's got the perfect 36 ACT, they're not going to need phonics,” Lieberman said. “But most of the kids we see, even if they're really good readers, they like this program because it helps them spell better. If they're not a good reader, it's giving them the tools.”

Contact the writer:

444-1077, joe.dejka@owh.com

« Metro/Region

Share