Nordonia adopts new ELA curriculum

by Chloe Leng

The Nordonia Hills City School District is changing its English Language Arts curriculum for grades K-12.

For the past four years, the school district’s three K-4 school buildings have been using pilot programs to test out different ELA curricula, according to Todd Stuart, director of curriculum and instruction.

During the trials of curriculum like IntoReading, CKLA and Benchmark Advance, data was collected to analyze their effectiveness. While the K-4 schools had pilot programs, the district’s middle and high school already had set curriculum.

State House Bill 33 requires schools to use curriculum that aligns with the Science of Reading standards, beginning with the 2024-25 school year. The Science of Reading focuses on learning to read by correlating sounds with letters or groups of letters. The state’s Department of Education and Workforce released a list of approved materials aligned with that methodology.

To abide by the new law, Stuart said the school district performed an “ELA adoption [across] K-12.” The K-4 schools had to replace the pilot programs and the high school needed new curriculum after the curriculum publisher was no longer providing material.

The board of education approved the Into Reading/IntoLiterature curriculum for the middle and high school in February and May, respectively. In July, the board approved the Benchmark Advance curriculum for grades K-4. Teachers reviewed the pilot programs using a rubric that consisted of different literacy skills.

“I want to thank the teachers,” said Stuart. “They put in a lot of extra work reviewing four extra programs, two of which happened in summer months.”

Stuart said Benchmark Advance was chosen because of the high marks it received in systematic phonics instruction, phonemic awareness activities, vocabulary instruction, fluency practice and comprehension strategies. The curriculum also offered resources for a multisensory approach, grammar and writing, and teacher resources and assessments.

Stuart said the assessments enable teachers to use “data from the tests to drive [future] instruction.”

According to the 2023-2024 Ohio school report cards, Nordonia received 4 out of 5 stars for literacy. Stuart said he has high hopes for Benchmark Advance’s ability to improve the education and literacy of students.

The curriculum should be implemented this school year and Stuart said he is looking forward to the changes Benchmark Advance has to offer. In the future, teachers will use “professional learning communities” to discuss, collaborate and plan strategies to better help students. 

It was important that the teachers were on board with the curriculum that was chosen because, as Stuart put it, “they are the ones working in the trenches” with the students and new programs. ∞