GRANADA – Three school officials provided updates on changes for the next school year regarding interventions, childcare and Chromebooks at Thursday’s Granada-Huntley-East Chain School Board meeting.

Director of Curriculum and Instruction Bethany Maday kicked things off. She said that the last few months have been spent poring over data on interventions and how best to utilize the staff at GHEC for students’ benefit.

After discussions with Superintendent Doug Storbeck, High School Principal Andy Walden and the intervention team, the decision has been made to revamp the program and class sizes as a whole for next year.

“We are going to split our core classes for reading in first, second and fifth grade,” Maday said. “Instead of me being the classroom teacher delivering to all 25 of you, we are going to split that. They will still have reading interventions in the afternoon for all elementary grades, and then we’ll have it for grades 6 through 12 as well.”

On the math side, Maday said the data has shown they should go in a slightly different direction.

“Math interventions just aren’t as effective as reading interventions are,” she said. “We are going to forego our math interventions and instead split our core classes for all math, K through 5. Same theory behind that, smaller class sizes.”

To emphasize the benefits of this change, Maday used the school board itself as an analogy.

“If you’re in a meeting and there’s 30 of you, or there’s 10 of you, which one are you more engaged and involved in?” She said. “Hopefully getting more engagement with our students, which will then lead to them really digging into the understanding of the material as well. The goals of our school is to keep those small class sizes, and now we can really hone in on that and give the best education to our kiddos.”

GHEC Community Education and Recreation Director Erin Roiger then provided an update on the Little Jags Preschool. Starting next year, the program will be expanding slightly.

“We are going to go forward with offering all day, every day, 4 and 5-year-old preschool, with 3s joining on Tuesday and Thursday mornings,” she said. “Right now, what we have signed up, we have seven 3-year-olds, that’s one more than what we have right now. We currently have in our 4s and 5s 17. It’s a smaller group. That’s part of our push, to see if this will help bring in any more fours and fives, but also just to get them in here every day.”

Board Chair Jessica Salic asked if these kids would be able to ride the school bus, including the 3-year-olds. Roiger said as long as they are riding with a buddy or a sibling, they are able to ride the bus.

Given this extension to doing preschool every school day, Board Member Ken Madsen asked if kids would be required to be at the preschool all five days after being signed up. Roiger clarified that it is not required, but it is good to have them there often to get them acquainted with the routine and language of education.

Lastly, Walden said the current plan for GHEC is to de-emphasize technology across the board, including their grades K through 4.

“There’s enough research out there with our letters training, amongst other things, that students need to be face-to-face with the teacher and work on those foundational skills,” Walden said. “Having a screen in front of you sometimes diminishes that opportunity to do those things.”

For the high schoolers, Walden said the current plan is for them to adopt GHEC’s middle school technology model for next year.

“They will not be assigned a one-to-one device as in previous years,” he said. “There’ll be Chromebook carts in the classrooms. Teachers can still use them at their discretion. I’ll acknowledge there’s some good sides to technology. It does promote deeper learning and understanding. There’s also some unintended consequences of kids disengaging, kids misusing the Chromebook, things we want to try to clean up in an effort to promote more student learning in the classroom.”

Right now, these plans are not final. Walden said they will be meeting with staff at all levels next week to solidify what technology will look like at GHEC in the fall.

In other news:

— AirGas is donating $3,000 in welding equipment to GHEC’s Career and Technical Education section. Walden said this is a partnership they are hoping to continue moving forward.

— With the new READ Act, Maday said she will work on the district’s literacy plan over the next few weeks, and it will be presented at the June school board meeting.