The Wellsville-Middletown R-I Board of Education’s first meeting of the New Year on Jan. 15 had presentations of reading progress and food services at the district.

District literacy coach Jennifer Sommer made a mid-year reading progress report for students in the elementary schools, while Mary Birmingham – director of nutrition services with OPAA Food Management – did a business review as well as offered nutrition plans to the district.

Sommer said it is essential that students need to start working on their phonics skills in their early years of elementary school. W-M has 11 students from grades 3-5 who are working on phonics.

“If they haven’t mastered their phonic skills by the middle of third grade, they typically lag behind in reading the rest of their academic career, so it’s really important that they learn their phonics skills as early as second grade,” Sommer said.

Sommer said that most of the third graders are working on fluency and comprehension. Out of the 25 third-grade students, four of them are working on phonics.

“The middle of the year has a huge jump from the beginning of the year to the middle of the year typically on words read per minute, which are 15 words,” Sommer said. “But they jumped up to 33 words. It’s hard for a lot of students to get there because by the middle of third grade, they should have all of their phonics skills down.”

Sommer also said that kindergarten students are working on phonemic awareness, almost half of the second-grade students are receiving services in basic reading, first-grade students are starting to learn how many words they can read per minute, most of the fourth-grade students are working on fluency and comprehension and fifth-grade students are performing successfully.

Sommer said the student population was a key factor when determining reading scores. 

“We haven’t had a lot of new students this year,” she said. “Twenty percent of our total student population are new students to the district. Our new students haven’t been from the same consistent curriculum that the current students have, so I feel like that played a big part in our reading.”

Sommer said she saw improvement in the Math for ELA scores within the last several years.

“Fifty seven percent of our fourth and fifth graders improved their scores,” Sommer said. “We had only 21 percent who are well below.”

Birmingham said during her presentation that there is 15 percent participation in breakfast and 33 percent participation in lunch within the district.

“We didn’t have a lot of participation in breakfast, but I’m really looking forward to changing that,” Birmingham said. “I think we’re kind of in competition with Casey’s or mom’s breakfast. So we don’t get a lot of kids here for breakfast.”

Birmingham discussed a couple of nutritional programs that would be no cost to the district. One of them is the CACFP Supper Program, which provides a free, nutritious meal during after-school hours. The North Callaway School District currently has that program.

“As long as they sign their name on it, we will get reimbursed for it,” Birmingham said. “They could have it to where they did it in the afternoon depending on what the school is comfortable with or it could be after school for sports and events.”

The other program is the Non Congregate Summer Feeding Program, which provides free, nutritious meals to children 18 and under over the summer. Children get two meals a day, seven days a week.