As Salem Elementary School Assistant Principal Devin Moody attempted to chat with a student in his office, he noticed that the boy was anxious to get away.
It wasn’t that Moody had the student in his office for disciplinary reasons. Instead, the boy was eager to get to work with his online reading tutor.
“He said, ‘Can you finish the conversation up like quickly because I’m trying to get to Ignite,’” Moody recalled the student saying of the one-on-one reading tutoring program.
“That really spoke to how engaged and how excited he was. He was like, ‘I really have to go to Ignite. I can’t miss Ignite.’”
The program, which is still in the early stages of implementation in Spotsylvania County Public Schools, has lit a spark in young readers.
Nearly 160 students participate in the program at Salem, and nearly 300 take part across the school division. In addition to Salem, the program is available at four middle schools in the county.
It was first implemented in the final two months of the 2023-24 school year, and school officials were looking forward to seeing what strides students could make during a full year of operations. SCPS Chief Academic Officer Deborah Frazier said “the data looked great” from the experiment at the end of last year.
“That’s why we did it again this year,” Salem Principal Tara Schohn said. “We’ve already had seven kids graduate from out of the program.”
Salem Elementary School students work one-on-one with an online tutor as part of the Ignite reading program. (Photo courtesy of Spotsylvania County Public Schools)
Approximately 6,000 students participate in Ignite in Virginia, according to data presented by the program’s director of partnerships, Celia Boltz.
Stafford County (600 students) is the only other locality in the Fredericksburg area involved in the program, which Boltz said has a mission of “teaching every student the foundational reading skills they need to become a confident, fluent reader.”
A presentation from Boltz to Spotsylvania school officials and Salem administrators displayed statistics showing 60% of youth must be taught with “code-based, explicit, systematic instruction or they will not learn to read.”
Boltz and others involved with the program believe that one teacher cannot deliver “explicit, differentiated instruction to all students who need it.”
That’s where Ignite steps in. The program offers an individualized tutor who works one-on-one with students to build relationships and confidence in reading.
“I think [students] like the one-on-one,” Salem Reading Specialist Christina Chaney said. “They might be shy or tentative about their ability. This creates that safe space, so that it’s only their tutor and them who know what they’re working on. So, they don’t need to worry about saving face so to speak, especially in the older grades … They feel comfortable there.”
The program is designed for students in grades 1-8. Frazier, a longtime principal at Chancellor Middle before transitioning to the division’s central office, said that even middle schoolers are enthralled with Ignite.
“What makes it safe for them as a middle school student is that it’s personalized learning,” Frazier said. “You have that one person that you’re connecting with, and you don’t have to worry about someone listening to you read or hear you mispronounce a word. It’s just you and your tutor, and that’s a safe space for middle schoolers.”
Data from Ignite shows that 78% of its users in Spotsylvania last March were minorities, and 57% did not have an Individualized Education Program (IEP). A total of 33% were English Language Learners (ELL). Each time a student passed an assessment, it amounted to a quarter of a school year of growth in foundational reading skills, according to a presentation from Boltz.
Although students up to as eighth grade participated, 67% of all students were on a kindergarten or first-grade reading level. A total of 26% emerged out of the kindergarten reading level within six weeks.
Similar trends have taken place this fall.
Schohn said the program is particularly helpful with Salem’s ELL students, who make up 44% of those currently participating at the school. The ethnicity breakdown shows 57% of the Salem students in the program are Latinx.
“They have tutors that speak their native languages, so they’ll ask them the question in the native language but teach them the skills in English,” Schohn said.
So far, it appears to be making a difference.
School officials said the Ignite tutors develop such strong relationships with the students that they oftentimes glean helpful information that can be passed along to teachers and administrators.
“The literacy specialists from Ignite, they know how the students are progressing,” SCPS Director of Teaching and Learning Maria Lewis said. “They can have a conversation about a student by name, and I think that’s what’s impressed me the most … Being as large as they are in Virginia and Massachusetts, the conversations are still very unique to students, and implementation is very personal and persistent.”
