JAY – School administrators reaffirmed Thursday their decision to revamp a literacy program to reach more students and teachers.

School Committee member Jim Durrell objected in February and again Thursday night to administrators changing the Literacy Collaborative program. Durrell said it has a track record of increasing young students’ reading levels.

However, Superintendent Stephen Cottrell, elementary Principal Beverly Gillespie and Middle School Principal Scott Albert want to increase the number of teachers and students a literary specialist can reach.

Literary Collaborative is a classroom-based, comprehensive school reform program designed to increase literacy achievement for all students. In order to stay in the collaborative program, staff members need to continue to train.

Currently, Jay’s program reaches kindergarten through second grades. A coordinator of the program works with students half the day and with teachers in kindergarten through grade two the rest of the day.

Administrators plan to revise the program next year to have a coordinator work with her own class half the day and then with teachers from kindergarten to sixth- or eighth-grade.

School administrators maintained that the proposed realignment would increase reading levels for more children while teaching more teachers new literacy methods that would help students. Jay School Committee members previously voted to have all students reading at grade level by the end of the third grade.

The move is also expected to free up some federal money to concentrate on improving students’ math skills.

It also helps with staffing at the elementary level. Earlier, Cottrell had said that he would have a hard time telling teachers that a fourth-grade teacher was going to be eliminated and the K-2 literacy program was staying.

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