Effort afoot to get black male students up to speed in reading

VIRGINIA BEACH

Six-year-old Angelo Rorie plucked a "g" from among several rows of letters.

"We always leave gaps in our line," he said to classmate Nikolas Thornton, tucking the letter into a plastic pocket ahead of a card marked "ap."

With state testing six weeks away, Virginia Beach and other school divisions are struggling to reduce widespread gaps in reading performance between African American males and other students.

Boys like Angelo and Nikolas will be on the front lines of that effort. The two, kindergartners at Diamond Springs Elementary, read above grade level. But citywide, more than one in four African American boys reads below grade level when he reaches third grade.

In 2007, the School Board made it a goal to change that. Increasing third-grade reading levels to 100 percent proficiency is one of 12 ways school leaders have vowed to improve black male performance.

Progress has been slow. While the performance of black males has improved, other groups have improved more. In 2009, the city's black males passed the state's third-grade reading test at a rate 17.3 percentage points lower than their peers. Closing that gap is another goal.

With the exception of efforts such as boys' reading groups, the approaches taken in Virginia Beach target all students.

Because school performance is directly affected by poverty, schools such as Diamond Springs have a bigger task than most. Three-quarters of its students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, the third-highest rate in the city.

"Everything we do has a literacy focus," said Assistant Principal Linda Reese. At the beginning of the year, parents and students sign an agreement to read together for 15 minutes a day. Instead of honor roll, the school gives pencils and holds a banquet for students who read a book a week.

In Kristine Wilson's kindergarten class, the walls are covered with hand-written lists of words such as "sight," "many" and "when." Every day, students do the "Daily 5," reading, writing, working with words, reading out loud and listening to stories. While Nikolas and Angelo sounded out words, others read out loud, listened to books on tape, wrote sentences or read books while slouching in beanbag chairs.

Many Beach schools use the Daily 5, and all use the computer-based Read 180 program and offer one-on-one help to struggling readers. But there are some school-based variations.

At Cooke Elementary, Principal Barb Sessoms has embraced the type of data-based reforms endorsed by U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan. She links student progress to the teachers they've had, then targets for additional training teachers whose performance is consistently weak.

Students Angelo and Nikolas are too young for state testing. The school division measures how well they're doing with a literacy screening instead. Last year, more than 90 percent of kindergartners and nearly 80 percent of first-graders at the school met targets.

Angelo's mother, Ayesha Noel, said the focus on literacy has worked for him. Since she began reinforcing the strategies used in Wilson's class, Angelo frequently asks what signs say and sounds out words.

"It's about time that the African American male community gets as much help as possible," she said. "It warms my heart that somebody has taken notice and said this is a real problem."

Lauren Roth, (757) 222-5133, lauren.roth@pilotonline.com