Five years ago in the Dietrich School District, it became clear to Superintendent Stefanie Shaw that something wasn’t working.

“We just felt like our kids were not reading to the level that we wanted them to be reading at, so we just made that our focus,” Shaw said.

That was the first of a handful of programs that Shaw implemented over the past five years. At the end of the 2020-21 school year, 50.4% of students were proficient in English Language Arts on the ISAT. This spring, 64.8% were proficient.

The nearly 15% jump is huge progress in any district but Dietrich is unique. The district serves about 170 students grades K-12.

The district has a higher percentage of low income and disabled students than the state average at 52% low income and 18 % with disabilities. Statewide about 44% of students come from low income families and 13% of student have a learning disability.

On top of that about 13% of Dietrich students are English learners and another 22% are from migrant families.

There are a lot of needs to be met, Shaw said. The district managed to implement a handful of new programs without a supplemental levy, instead relying on federal programs and grants.

Individualized Instruction

The district averages around 15 students per class, Shaw said.

“Kids don’t fall through the cracks here,” she said.

On top of the small teacher to student ratio, Shaw uses most of her Title 1 funds to hire paraprofessionals. Those paras largely support special education students but she also uses that extra support to give students who are struggling with a concept but maybe don’t qualify for and Individualized Education Plan (IEP) additional instruction.

She renovated the SPED area in the school into individual offices for the paras, so they can pull individual students or small groups out into a quiet room for that re-teaching.

“Sometimes it’s two or three kids and they can take them and they can work on the stuff that they learn in the classroom in a more controlled environment,” Shaw said.

Shaw said federal programs like Title 1, the migrant student program, Title 2 and Rural Education Achievement Program (REAP) are essential to hiring those paraprofessionals without asking the community for a supplemental levy.

The extra support from paras doesn’t just help the students who may need it but also helps the students who are on track in class or even working ahead, she said.

“Then you’re teaching to the majority of the kids in the class, not that lower kid,” Shaw said. “They can still focus on and keep moving the other kids ahead but these kids can get the instruction and the time they need to learn those concepts so they don’t have these big holes.”

The high population of English learning and low income students increases the level of learning loss over the summer, Shaw said. Parents who are struggling financially don’t have the time or the money to put their children in summer programs or take them to the library, she said.

For example, on the Fall 2024 Idaho Reading Indicator 57.1% of students grades K-3 were reading at grade level. That jumped to 85.4% in the Spring after a full year of instruction.

Constant data monitoring

When students can’t read, they struggle to learn in other subjects, Shaw said. So the district invested in Istation about five years ago and began doing monthly benchmark assessments.

The frequent assessments allow staff to see where students are struggling and reteach those areas. But monitoring all that data is time consuming, so Shaw hired a reading intervention teacher full-time three years ago.

She only had the funding for a full time position for that one year,  now the reading intervention teacher gets a stipend for their work.

Students are broken into small groups based on the reading level the monthly data shows they’re at. Then twice a week students spend 40 minutes in those groups working on their reading skills.

Each quarter the high achieving students get rewarded with a book.

The constant data monitoring isn’t just for reading, in math student data also informs instruction, Shaw said.

Writing in every subject

Two years ago, Shaw saw that while ELA scores on the ISAT were improving, writing was still a problem for her students.

The district implemented a writing portfolio requirement at all grade levels.

“It’s every teacher,” Shaw said. “My AG teacher has writing prompts they’re giving the kids, the PE teacher does, everyone does.”

Admittedly she went a little overboard the first year but Shaw said she thinks they’ve found a happy medium with two required pieces of writing per year in core subjects and one prompt in other classes.

Overall, the jump in test scores is due to the combination of programs, goal setting, and a staff that treats students like family, Shaw said.