GILROY
– Thanks to consistently dwindling enrollment and an
increasingly tight budget, it appears a program designed to help
dyslexic children and other students with language disabilities
will be cut from the Gilroy Unified School District.
GILROY – Thanks to consistently dwindling enrollment and an increasingly tight budget, it appears a program designed to help dyslexic children and other students with language disabilities will be cut from the Gilroy Unified School District.
For the first time since the Slingerland program’s inception at GUSD, kindergartners will not be screened this spring to determine whether they could benefit from the program’s specialized instruction in first through third grade. Teachers and parents who support Slingerland instruction read that as a clear sign the district has no intention of admitting children into the program next year.
In about two months, district staff will make a recommendation to the board regarding the Slingerland program’s fate. Slingerland techniques have been used at Eliot for more than 20 years.
“Over the past several years there’s been an alarmingly low number of students opting to go to the program,” Assistant Superintendent Jacki Horejs said. “One of the things we’re looking at is the market value of it. If there’s no interest, do we want to put resources into testing and training?”
It costs the district $5,000 to train each Slingerland teacher, not counting expenses related to traveling to training conferences that run for four weeks. A training that was held within the district in order to cut down on costs, trained six teachers for $25,000.
“It’s not cheap,” said Eliot Elementary School Principal Diane Elia.
The instruction program was founded by Beth Slingerland and came into vogue in the 1960s. Slingerland theorists believe that all learning takes place through auditory, visual and kinesthetic faculties. Linking these is especially challenging for dyslexic children.
Eliot is the district’s only Slingerland school. Roughly 210 of Eliot’s 385 students are in the program. Last year, 80 kindergartners across the district qualified for Slingerland. Only 20 chose to use it.
“Every year the percentage of students who choose Slingerland is less and less. This last year was the worst,” Elia said.
Slingerland is one of three specialized instruction programs under scrutiny since GUSD abandoned its magnet school format in favor of consistent curricula at schools districtwide. The other two programs – Gifted And Talented Education and Dual Immersion – will endure budget cuts like everything else, but have for the most part expanded their scope this year.
Nearly all of Eliot’s 19 teachers are trained under the Slingerland approach. First- and second-graders at Eliot receive one and a half hours of specialized language arts instruction, third-graders receive 45 minnutes. Now that GUSD has switched to a neighborhood schools enrollment policy, the high influx of English Language Learners who reside near the Seventh Street campus receive their own type of language arts instruction.
Horejs and Elia said Slingerland will continue for students already in the program, even though its fate is unknown for future kids.
“I’m glad my son will continue to get Slingerland instruction, but I feel for future students; a lot of them will get lost in the cracks,” Slingerland parent Miriam Dempler said.
Dempler’s second-grade son is in his first year of Slingerland instruction. He did not enter last year because the family did not live in Gilroy when the kindergarten screenings were done.
“I’ve seen what he can do in regular classes and I’ve seen what he can do in Slingerland classes. This year he is reading books and writing sentences. It’s a lot more than he could do last year,” Dempler said.
It is not clear why so few eligible families decide to enroll students in Eliot’s Slingerland program.
Dempler has two ideas.
“I think one of the problems is that the program is only at Eliot,” said Dempler. “It’s on ‘the other side of town’ and that makes a difference.”
Eliot is one of the district’s oldest and cramped campuses. Next year, its students will be housed at the new middle school while Eliot gets demolished and rebuilt into two-story classrooms.
Dempler also figures there are parents in denial and parents who believe their child’s needs can get met through regular instruction, especially when learning disabilities do not seem severe.
“I really believe the symptoms will catch up with the student at least by junior high,” Dempler said. “You can end up with students who can read, but don’t comprehend.”
Another factor in the program’s low enrollment may be the district’s shortage of data comparing Slingerland students to Slingerland-eligible kids that did not enter the program.
“That’s the question we’re all asking right now. We have a school that’s a magnet for a particular instructional program, but no data to support more or less how effective it is,” Horejs said.
According to the Slingerland Institute for Literacy, research indicates the program is effective. Studies conducted over the last 15 years indicate Slingerland approaches:
• Help children achieve grade level and above level scores on standardized tests.
• Increase chances of receiving C grades or better for Hispanic students.
• Maintain spelling skills for a longer period of time.
For Horejs, the number of kids not enrolling in Eliot represents confidence parents have that their children’s needs are being met by the district’s new language arts curriculum. The new curriculum incorporates some Slingerland techniques and is based on teaching the course content required by the state.
“There are a lot of similar strategies (between Slingerland and regular instruction) being incorporated into language arts,” Horejs said.
Among other strategies, an emphasis on phonics – the breaking down of words into their smallest phonetic parts – is used both in Slingerland and regular GUSD instruction.
Nonetheless, Slingerland supporters don’t believe the two instructional styles are comparable enough.
“We can’t meet all the needs of the Slingerland kids (who would be in regular classrooms) without putting some extra resources toward them,” Elia said.
