PS 295 on 18th Street in the South Slope is one of two schools in Brooklyn that is receiving a $50,000 investment for a dyslexia pilot program. The other school, PS 107 on 8th Avenue in Park Slope, also received $50,000.
This new specialized program is for students with dyslexia or who are otherwise struggling to read, Schools Chancellor David Banks announced.
The schools are part of a promise made by Mayor Eric Adams, whose dyslexia was not diagnosed until he was in college, to bring at least one program like this to each borough. Adams’s administration had previously announced dyslexia pilot programs in Manhattan and The Bronx.
“I am very appreciative of what we did get,” PS 295 principal Valerie Vaderpuije said. “It’s really nice that I can invest in some of the decodable readers that I have been able to this spring so that is going to be a nice influx of books that are more tailored towards the programming that we are using.”
With the investment, the principal has been able to train the staff in helpful programming. She is arranging for more training with the Orton Gillingham program, which some of the staff had already been trained in.
“Now we can afford to get even more people trained in that program, so that is really nice,” Vanderpuije said. “Orton Gillingham is a way of teaching literacy that has been shown to be very effective for students with dyslexia.”
However, the program is not just for students with dyslexia. It works well for students with dyslexia since it is a strong, systematic and powerful approach to teaching literacy in the foundational years.
The two schools in Brooklyn and the others chosen around the city are among the landmark structured literacy schools, which means all those teachers are trained to support students who are at risk for dyslexia and other print based learning disabilities.
The funds for the school are being used to offer the specialized training for the educators. The training for the teachers will allow them to continue this new revamped and improved programming in the years to come.
The pilot program officially started at PS 295 last September. PS 295 had already taken steps to help students with special needs and to transform their approach to education overall last year.
“The funding allows us to do this change more rapidly and more cohesively because we have the resources we need to do it,” the principal said. “But this is a change that started last year. Last year was the first year we moved to Super Kids, which is our reading program in kindergarten through second grade.”
Everyone at the school has been screened for dyslexia with a universal screener called Acadience, which happens throughout the district.
“Everyone is getting screened with Acadience to see if there are areas where certain students need to focus and areas where teachers need to look at carefully,” Vanderpuije said. “Depending on how they do with the Acadience screener, there would be further screeners for those who are flagged as needing further screening.”
“We have made the most dramatic changes in our early grades because it is so important to make those foundational changes in kindergarten and first grade especially,” Vanderpuije said. “I am really looking forward to seeing how those changes move up with the students and how we change the upper grades as we broaden the scope of our work.”
They had been using a way of structuring and organizing books based on levels. It was called level readers, which was when they were using more balanced literacy.
“It was a whole language approach to reading,” Vanderpuije said. “We found that approach had not been equally effective for all of our populations, so we are switching to this new design to reading approach, which has a larger emphasis on things like phonemic awareness and phonics.
The books that support their new approach with the new emphasis on phonemic awareness and phonics are decodable readers. They are tailored to look at the skills, sounds and letters that they intentionally taught the students instead of asking them to guess the words.
According to the principal, the new approach allows them to practice taught reading skills whereas in the previous literacy approach, they had to figure things out.
“It is good to learn how to figure things out using logic, but when you do that you are not necessarily practicing the decoding skills, the actual work of figuring out what letters make what sound,” Vanderpuije said.
This pilot program is a shift from their balanced literacy approach to this more systematic approach that focuses heavily on phonemic awareness and phonics.
They knew years ago that change needed to happen but they were not sure who would give them the funding to make it happen.
They were pleased when this opportunity happened with Assembly Member Robert Carroll.
Carroll, who was diagnosed with dyslexia in first grade, is proud that this is happening.
“I know how important early identification and intervention are to remediating dyslexia and making all children academically successful,” Carroll said. “These funds will provide the teacher training in literacy that is required to teach all of our children to read and I am so proud to stand shoulder to shoulder with this Mayor and Chancellor to support this vital pilot program.”
According to Nicole Brownstein, director of media relations at NYC Public Schools, PS 295 was chosen for this investment because it is a Title One school in assembly member Carroll’s district.
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