Teachers gather for San Mateo-Foster City School District early literacy summit

On the panel were classroom teachers and teachers on special assignments, referred to as TOSAs, from various SM-FCSD campuses. The educators work like a team, identifying which students may need more support and separating them out into groups for more focused time with a TOSA.

The key takeaway from the panel — students need consistency and routine when learning the basics Elizabeth Lucey, a teacher on special assignment at Beach Park Elementary School, said.

“It’s consistency, it’s repetition. You have to do it every day. They need exposure every day,” Lucey said about PAF, the multisensory tool the district uses to teach reading, writing and spelling. “PAF time is sacred.”

The PAF Reading Program, students are taught how to properly hold pencils so their hands don’t hurt and to write letters so they connect with their sounds. By focusing on how a single letter looks and sounds and what it feels like to write the letter, students build automatic recall.

Intervening early and in small groups is important as well, educators agreed. At the start of the school year, first graders are assessed on their skill levels and separated into groups based on their needs, allowing a teacher to focus on students exceeding grade level while a TOSA works more closely with those falling behind. Teachers are also encouraged to rope reading and writing lessons into other subjects like science.

The approach is a major change. Kelly Westberg, a TOSA focused on language and literacy, said the COVID-19 pandemic helped reveal the “smoke and mirrors” of how children are typically taught to read. Rather than walking students through the building blocks of a word and its meaning, Westberg said students were being encouraged to look at pictures in a book and guess words.

“Wow, we’re really teaching kids habits that are compensating for weak skills,” Westberg said. “Parents got a front row seat nationwide of what’s going on so we’re looking for something that was actually going to support all of our kids and that’s explicit systematic phonics.”

Megan Freeman, who’s been with the district for 16 years, said teachers often would not do the fundamental work in the classroom before sending a student off to a specialist for additional help.

Through programs like PAF and Footsteps2Brillliance, a digital bilingual literacy platform, teachers and TOSAs are working closer together to provide students with a more well-rounded education. The approach has helped students who were falling behind catch up and reenter class, educators said.

“As a classroom teacher there were a lot of demands on our reading specialist to catch them,” Freeman said. “That’s not really a sustainable model. … We know now so we can do better.”

Also vital to learning is quality nutrition. Fran Debost, director of Child Nutrition Services, said the district has spent the last nearly two years upgrading its main kitchen. Over the years, the kitchen had become like a distribution site, sending processed foods to schools for student lunches. Ochoa drew laughs from the room when pointing out the irony of feeding children sugary cereals and then questioning why a student may act out or struggle to focus.

Now the district is pivoting back to a hand-made lunch model and is in the process of hiring a chef, Debost said. And with the district’s expansion of community schools — campuses that offer more services to students and their families — some students will receive up to three meals from the district, Ochoa said.

“We’re using a transformational model to say cook food everyone wants, even all the adults,” Ochoa said. “It’s predicated on seeing the dignity of all of the staff that cooks this food, that wants to cook good food, and caring enough about what it means for a child to have two or in some cases three good meals.”