Small school thinking big spells reading success
Reading specialist Carolyn Hubnik leads a 1st-grade student in the Tier II intervention Proactive Reading at Thrall Elementary.
Photos by Sarah Harrison
Put a finger on a map of Texas. From Austin, trace I-35 north to Round Rock, then on to US-79. Follow that east through the sleepy country towns of Hutto and Taylor. Seven miles later, straddling the highway, is Thrall, Texas—population 710, give or take a few.
Thrall Independent School District comprises three schools: Thrall Elementary, Thrall Middle School, and Thrall High School. All share the same campus—that’s pre-kindergarten through 12th grade. Thrall is a place where purple and white dominate the school halls on Fridays when the Tigers have a big football game, a place where 1st graders cheer alongside seniors at pep rallies.
“We’re like one big family here,” said Denise Carter, Thrall Elementary’s first-year principal.
One little family may be more accurate, but what Thrall lacks in size, it more than makes up in hard work, ingenuity, and dedication to its students’ success.
Doing a lot with a little
“We have excellent teachers who know the community and add to our family atmosphere, but when we need to bring people in, we don’t exactly have people beating down our door,” said Carter, who recently earned a master’s in public school administration from The University of Texas at Austin. “We have to be creative.”
One example of that creativity is Thrall Elementary’s participation in the Vaughn Gross Center for Reading and Language Arts’ Scale-Up reading project. Scale-Up is a five-year investigation of the processes involved with implementing in multiple schools with multiple contexts two 1st-grade reading interventions that differ dramatically in theoretical orientation and instructional design.
A Thrall 1st grader pores over a lesson.
“Our budget is extremely tight, and we get some of the latest research for free,” Carter said of the project. “This gives us another tool to help kids learn to read.”
As a rural school with limited resources, Thrall’s dedication to scientifically based reading research is impressive enough. But according to members of the Scale-Up team, Thrall is more than a participating school: It is a model school.
“Many people assume that Tier II interventions have a personnel demand that can’t be met at rural schools,” said Elizabeth Swanson, a Center researcher on the Scale-Up project. “Thrall proves that wrong.”
Reading specialist Carolyn Hubnik, a 35-year veteran educator, leads the implementation of Thrall’s intervention for the project, Proactive Reading. Hubnik says she is thrilled with the program and has seen marked improvement from the students taking part in the instruction.
Carter knows that is no small endorsement. “[Hubnik] knows a lot about reading instruction,” she said. “For her to say this is one of the best curricula she has used — that really means something.”
A student takes his turn to read to the group.
Hubnik, who has undergone training sessions on the intervention and has on-demand access to advisors, points to one aspect of the intervention that has been especially effective. “The emphasis on phonemic awareness — that’s made a difference. It’s something that’s hard to diagnose when students are deficient. Because most do it naturally, it is easy to miss.”
Success stories
Through analyzing monthly tests from the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literary Skills (DIBELS), among other data, researchers will gauge the effectiveness of Proactive Reading Intervention, the program being used at Thrall. But even before that, both Hubnik and Carter can attest to the change it has made in students’ lives.
“There is one child whom I was very concerned about, as were his parents,” Hubnik said. “He exhibited immature language patterns and other problems. Now, after taking part in the program, he’s reading on his own, and his parents are thrilled. I think reading will be his strong avenue of learning.”
Carter, whose four children all attend Thrall, spoke of a non-native English speaker who was struggling to learn to read. “I’ve seen a phenomenal difference,” she said. “He is excited about the program. He comes up to me and says, ‘Ms. Carter, look what I read.’”