Courtesy Photo Courtney Kindt, Supporting Teachers and Readers Successfully interventionist, helps students with their reading skills Thursday at Ella White Elementary School in Alpena.

ALPENA — Students in the Alpena-Montmorency-Alcona Educational Service District’s Supporting Teachers and Readers Successfully — or STARS — program are continuing to make gains in reading despite the many challenges of the coronavirus pandemic.

STARS is designed to help struggling students learn or reinforce previously taught reading skills. The program currently serves 270 students from kindergarten to 3rd grade in Alpena, Alcona, and Montmorency counties, with the goal of lessening the number of students referred to special education.

Julie Bastow, ELA Curriculum Specialist K-12, and Intervention Coach Hillary Robinette said students first learn about phonemic awareness, which is how to listen for letters and what sounds they make, and then phonics, which is putting the sounds together to make words.

Robinette said this school year 90% of students who engaged in differentiated reading instruction made growth in one or more skill levels and 98% of students in the small group Heggerty phonics made growth in the baseline assessment for that group.

The progress was made as both students and interventionists navigated the challenges of this school year.

Bastow said program officials had to brainstorm and think differently about how they were going to provide intervention to students as they have to be cohorted. Interventionists have been meeting with small groups of students on Google meet, an online conferencing platform.

“It’s not like when you take your instruction from face to fact to virtual, you can just be like, ‘Okay, now we’re going to teach on the computer,’ — it doesn’t work that way,” she said. “For us to make this leap, it took us a significant amount of work, time and energy to flip our program.”

Bastow said you have to figure out how to engage students for intervention online and make materials accessible on a computer screen. Interventionists also had to learn how to manage behaviors when kids are off task and not paying attention, she said.

Meanwhile, the STARS program has also seen success from its long-term strategy, where there has also been a decrease in the number of students referred to special education.

Shellie Gohl, early learning and instructional services coordinator for the AMA ESD, said when the program started during the 2011-12 school year, 10% of students eventually received special education. The number of students who eventually received special education had decreased to about 3% during the 2017-18 school year.

“We’re really proud of it and that just goes to show that multi-tiered systems of support that districts and the AMA have been working toward for the last decade, when done well, will really pay off in the end,” she said.