“I feel like a kid in a candy store being able to give all these students support that we were never able to provide before. It’s awesome and so good for students and teachers.”
That’s what Wealthy Elementary School Principal Carlye Allen says about the new, improved Elementary Intervention Paraeducator (EIP) program, which is launching this semester. The EIP is funded by money raised through the community-wide One East campaign the Foundation organized last summer.
Thanks to Foundation donors, EGRPS is bringing back paraeducator support to our teachers, but in a new and improved delivery model. The restructured EIP model will benefit students even more because it is focused solely on direct student instruction rather than general classroom support. The new model retains some of its K-1 focus, yet has the flexibility to meet specific math and literacy needs of students from kindergarten through fifth grade.
The program provides one Intervention Paraeducator (IP) at each building every morning supporting K-1 students with reading and writing, conferring, and math interventions. The program will also provide two additional IPs at each building every afternoon. These IPs will provide evidence-based math and literacy interventions to specifically identified students in grades K-5. Intervention Training for the IP’s includes multiple research-based interventions in Leveled Literacy Intervention, Units of Study Phonics, Units of Study Reading, Units of Study Writing, Orton-Gillingham, Heggerty, Touch Math, and others as needed.
The new program, developed in partnership with EGRPS reading interventionists and kindergarten and first grade teachers, will provide math and literacy interventions to as many as 192 students per day (64 per building) across all three elementary schools. “These are 192 students that previously we may not have been able to service with targeted, evidence-based math and literacy interventions,” says EGRPS Assistant Superintendent of Instruction Jenny Fee. “Everyone is excited about this new and improved model of support.”
