Challenge

Chilton County Schools (CCS) is a mostly rural school district located in central Alabama, compromised of 12 campuses, all of which receive Title I funding. When Ashlie Harrison stepped into the newly created role of Director of Teaching and Learning in 2017, one of the things she hoped to do was to make sure that the district had the right tools in place to meet the needs of students and help teachers be more effective. After reviewing the district’s current online programs, she noticed that there wasn’t much consistency in usage and that teachers just didn’t feel that that the programs were meeting the needs of their students. So, in early 2017, Ms. Harrison and her team put together a committee with representation from all campuses to determine what the district needed from an online program provider.

“We really needed something to help with remediation of the students who were falling behind, but we also, at the same time, wanted to accelerate students who were excelling in the classroom,” explained Ms. Harrison. “We also knew that we were going to need something that we could do credit recovery with and maybe even obtaining original credit.”

Solution

To make sure that all students would receive instruction and practice at a level that was just right for them, CCS implemented Exact Path, Edmentum’s K–12 adaptive assessment and individualized learning program.

“They take that assessment at the beginning, and it gives them a path that is very individualized for that student, and that's what we wanted,” explained Ms. Harrison. “We didn't want a program that was just a blanket where everybody gets the same thing. We wanted it to be something that was very individualized for our students, and we felt like this program did that.”

Students in grades 2–8 use Exact Path during designated center or independent work time. Teachers use the data from the program to help determine small groups and inform classroom instruction. Additionally, if there is a concept that teachers want to reteach in a different way, they will often utilize the lessons in Exact Path for whole-group instruction.

Exact Path is also used at the high school for students who have difficulty mastering math or ELA concepts, who have learning gaps from prior grade levels, or who are in special education and need additional individualized support.

CCS high school students also use Courseware, Edmentum’s customizable course offerings for grades 6–12, in a variety of ways to catch up when they have fallen behind, to retake or make up content that they didn’t master for a better chance of passing the course on the first try, and to prepare for the ACT.

"If the student's struggling with certain standards, we go in [to Courseware] and pull those standards and give them additional work, trying to front-load, and hopefully help them out before they actually fail the course to keep them from having to go to summer school or things like that,” said Ms. Harrison.

Another challenge that CCS is addressing with Courseware is the need to be able to reach more students with fewer teachers and maintain reasonable class sizes. For subjects that are in high demand, teachers are paired with teacher assistants to run two concurrent sections of the class. In each classroom, students complete coursework online using Courseware. The assigned teacher is the teacher of record for both sections and is responsible for rotating between the classrooms to provide support and feedback to students. The teacher assistant rotates between classes as well, helping manage behavior and keep students on task when the teacher is in the other classroom. With this model, the teacher can effectively support twice the number of students without increasing class size or teacher workload, and this saves the district money.

Result

In the first year of its implementation of Edmentum programs, CCS experienced positive impacts.

“We had several schools in our district that had 98 percent or better growth, even from within their schools, which was excellent. And, I would say Clanton Intermediate was probably our best result of that. They had 100 percent growth, so 100 percent of their students showed growth from the time that they started at the intermediate school to the end of last [school]year,” Ms. Harrison explained.

Because of the outstanding growth, Clanton Intermediate School won $20,000 from the $1 Million for Reading Success program for being one of the top 50 schools in Alabama for reading gains from the beginning to the end of the 2017–18 school year. This achievement was the result of a tremendous amount of hard work and effort from both teachers and students during the entire school year.

“Obviously, our overall goal was to improve student achievement, and at this point, I think we're doing a great job of doing that through [Edmentum programs],” said Ms. Harrison.