Loyal School Board tables decision on American Reading Company curriculum

After listening to the concerns of parents and staff, the Loyal School Board voted on May 24 to table discussion on purchasing materials that would have changed the reading curriculum in the elementary grades from Wonders to the American Reading Company (ARC). While a decision will still have to be made on the future reading curriculum choice, the board felt that more information and a plan on how a new curriculum would be implemented are needed before approval.

Several parents, along with a couple of school staff members spoke during the public comments portion of the meeting about the proposed ARC plan, with all speaking at the meeting being against adopting ARC as the elementary curriculum. One of the main concerns brought up by parents speaking at the meeting was how students at the elementary level may end up struggling more with reading due to the lack of phonics being taught in the ARC curriculum.

“Wisconsin has been struggling with low literacy rates,” said Kim Bremmer, a former school board member and parent of a Loyal graduate. “When I went to the capital, they (the legislators) were talking about moving to phonics-based teaching as a requirement in Wisconsin schools. I asked them what their thoughts on ARC were and they said that if it came to a vote and this was passed, ARC would not fit into it because it’s the opposite of what is needed at younger levels.”

Currently, the Loyal School District offers a curriculum called Wonder for its elementary students and uses ARC at the middle school level. There haven’t been any issues with teaching ARC in the middle school, and as the school looks for an updated reading curriculum, middle/high school principal Doug Dieckman said the plan recommended by CESA 10 was to expand ARC into the elementary.

“Our local CESA 10 is a resource that we typically use when we’re looking at programming for English or math,” he said. “The CESA ELA (English and Language Arts) folks were doing a lot of research on the American Reading Company and they also at the same time are passionate on a universal design for learning. So that is where we heard about it… Wonders needs to be updated, it’s getting close to that lifespan and there are a couple new courses already available. What we have isn’t the most current.”

Dieckman spoke at length to the board about the ARC curriculum and how its structure would work in the classroom. Addressing the lack of phonics specifically, he said the ARC curriculum has some wiggle room that could allow teachers to bring some of those lessons in, but the curriculum does best with a more rigid framework.

“You could probably design a framework for yourself, I think the challenge is that you’re trying to fit one package into another package,” he said. “Things will not match up.”

After listening to Dieckman’s explanation on the ARC curriculum, members of the board expressed concern with the idea of purchasing a new curriculum without getting more input.

“Shouldn’t we have a plan?” asked David Clintsman Jr. “Don’t you think we should work with our teachers and come up with a plan that we can all say ‘Yes, this is how we’re going to do it’? Don’t you think we can do something like that versus, ‘Hopefully it works’?”

Based on these concerns, the board voted to table discussion on a new reading curriculum until they had more information with which to form a plan. Right now, they said there are too many issues that would come up if a plan was approved at the meeting. If they want their students to be successful in reading, the curriculum needs to be something parents and teachers are willing to use.

“It would do a big disservice if we approved this tonight,” said board member Derek Weyer. “The people speaking tonight need to be in favor of this. The people who will have to implement this every day have to be in favor of this. Based on the comments we’ve seen, they’re not.”

The board voted unanimously to approve tabling purchasing the ARC curriculum for the elementary.