RWE alternative calendar renewal

Hot Springs School Districts’ Ralph Witters Elementary (RWE) will submit its renewal for their alternative calendar to have every second Friday of the month be a teacher training day.

The RWE alternative calendar is needed because hourly requirements are met, but the number of days (175 for students) would be altered. Currently, they are 100 contact hours over the required hours at RWE.

According to superintendent Dustin Hunt, the reason they have an alternative calendar is “The Wyoming Legislature has set a focus on improving reading outcomes across the state. Our kids deserve to be readers. And, our area of growth for student achievement is in early literacy.” 

Therefore, for RWE to meet these goals, Hunt said, “RWE Staff has requested increased reading training. The training will be cyclical to ensure that staff are well-versed in the training and new staff are brought out to speed.”

Hunt continued, “The current required professional development requirements do not allow for additional training.” 

Therefore, the school will have full professional development days. Hunt said that “Bringing in a trainer for half days is not available, or cost prohibitive. Those Second Fridays would be full days for staff.” Also, RWE Training has one remaining unit for next fall and the 2023-2024 will work on the vertical alignment of the curriculum kindergarten through grade four.”

Hunt added, “Every teacher must become a reading expert.” Also, Hunt said, “If you talk to our elementary teachers, the vast majority of those folks got trained in philosophy and theory and unless they just got placed with a really, really great reading teacher in their student teaching placement, some of them had minimal actual literacy training in their degrees, which is frustrating. That’s something we’d like to see change.”

One challenge the staff faces is the amount of time available to continue their professional development. Hunt said, “For an elementary teacher, there’s just no real time in the schedule to add more to their professional development plate and then come in the summer and they do 30 hours of curriculum work and training with their principal. You could do some of that in the summer, but that would be a cost-prohibitive thing to be able to pull staff in for nine days.”

According to RWE Principal Nichole Ciz, the students will learn more about phonics in addition to sight reading and memorization of words. Ciz said, “That’s that whole switch from moving to balance for balance literacy over the past few years to structured literacy. That’s all the training that we’ve been working through this entire year with our letters and some of the training that our staff has been working through.”