HUBBARD — With the school year at its halfway point, the Hubbard Board of Education heard updates on a curriculum adopted last year.

At last week’s regular board meeting, Hubbard Elementary Principal Shawn Marcello and K-8 Assistant Principal Sarah Herrholtz presented residents and school officials with data regarding their reading curriculum, which uses four components.

Herrholtz said the Amplify Core Knowledge Language Arts, a comprehensive, science-of-reading-based program that combines foundational skills (phonics, spelling) with knowledge-building in science, history and literature made up the program’s core, providing a skills component.

Students use Lexia, a personalized phonics fluency and comprehension program, allowing students to “self-monitor” their levels, which are directly correlated with where the student is, according to Herrholtz.

To progress monitor students on root skills, Herrholtz said the district utilizes Acadience, a diagnostic tool used on all grade levels that is issued three times a year.

Marcello said he and Herrholtz have noticed a difference in lesson distribution, noting they’re able to differentiate between CKLA and Heggerty, the school’s preexisting program.

“You’ll go into a room and you’ll see a teacher do a Heggerty lesson, and with Heggerty, they chop words and they do these hand motions and different things that help them build their reading skills,” Marcello said. “Then you’ll go into the next room, they’re doing the same skill — but they’re doing it in a different way. They’re doing an activity on the Smartboard, or they’re doing an activity on dry erase boards at their desk.”

Marcello said he has the teachers note which program they’re using sometimes, saying it was “really neat” to see how the programs were connected.

“The kids don’t even realize they’re just getting more repetition with the same skills, but they’re getting it in a different format; they enjoy the Heggerty and the hand motions and the movement,” Marcello said. “Now they’re getting it on the skill side, by doing different activities, so it’s fantastic. These four components work together really well.”

Marcello said they’re meeting with every teacher at the middle of the year to check in on student growth, which is easy to do with programs like Acadiance.

Marcello said Acadiance allows him to sort students by progress, enabling discussions around ones who might have fallen behind because of reasons such as absences.

Marcello said they had a pilot group several years ago, a small group of kindergarteners taught by teachers utilizing CKLA.

He said the following year, they adopted its skill component for Kindergarten through second grade, fully adopting the program a year later.

“We do have some kids in third grade, and we can actually see right now with those third graders, the kids — some of the kids that are not on track — are not in that pilot group versus kids that were on the pilot group are on track,” Marcello said.

Regarding the state’s ELA fall test, Herrholtz said 55% of the school’s third graders met the passing score, adding that the number of students scoring zero in the writing section dropped from 38 to 11.

Marcello explained that students were flagged the previous year because of their use of text evidence, combined with the AI system’s grading methods.

“It flagged them for not having enough original text, because our teachers chirped to them, ‘You have to go back and find text evidence and cite the text,'” Marcello said. “Our third graders, they listened to their teachers, so they’re going back and typing from the passage.

“If they don’t change one of those words or paraphrase it, it flags it, and says it’s not original, and it gives them zero points.”