School Improvement Plan

Sunny Hills Elementary launched our previous School Improvement Plan with a reading focus in the 2018-19 school year. The goal at that time was to demonstrate improved student performance in reading by achieving a 10% increase in students meeting standard from 78% of all students meeting standard on the Smarter Balanced ELA assessment in Spring 2018 to 88% of all students meeting standard on the same assessment in Spring 2021. However, given the impacts of the pandemic on the 2019-20 and 2020-21 school years, similar to other schools, Sunny Hills took a hiatus from our three-year plan in the 2020-21 school year, and instead implemented a one-year plan focusing on student engagement in remote and hybrid learning. Then, during the 2021-22 school year, Sunny Hills resumed the previous three-year plan for a final year of work towards our reading goal.

• Through the years prior to the pandemic, our time in remote and hybrid learning, and upon return to in-person school last year, Sunny Hills students demonstrated consistent growth in their reading performance. This growth can be attributed to many factors, including the successful implementation of the following actions in our School Improvement Plan:

• Small group, guided reading instruction and one-on-one conferring
  • A focus on targeted reading instruction for all students, and particularly striving readers who are below or approaching grade level, was a hallmark of our school improvement work in reading throughout the years of our School Improvement Plan and will continue to be at the center of our reading instruction in the future. Classroom teachers, along with Certificated and Classified support staff, use information gained from reading alongside students, along with information from student assessments, to set goals and target instructional plans for regular small group and one-on-one instructional time with students.
• Use of research-based assessment tools including the i-Ready Diagnostic, WTW Spelling Inventory and Fountas and Pinnell assessments
  • In addition to the Smarter Balanced ELA assessment for students in 3rd-5th grades, all Sunny Hills students completed the i-Ready Diagnostic assessments, WTW Spelling Inventory (1st-5th grade) and Fountas and Pinnell assessments. These assessments served as valuable resources for monitoring student progress throughout the school year. These assessments allowed Sunny Hills teachers to identify and plan for the needs of all students, and they guide instructional decisions such as small group placement, intervention assignments, and more. Additionally, this information helped teachers to target instruction around particular needs and strategies as well. Sunny Hills teachers will continue to use these assessment tools to support student learning in the future.
• Implementation of reading success blocks and targeted instruction utilizing resources from the Issaquah School District’s Reading Foundational Skills curriculum adoption: Benchmark Phonics in Kindergarten, Heggerty in Kindergarten and 1st Grade, and Words Their Way in 1st-5th Grade.
  • In the 2021-22 school year, Sunny Hills implemented our District’s new Reading Foundational Skills curriculum for all students as well as the structure of Success Blocks to ensure focused time for targeted reading foundational skills instruction for every student in every classroom. As a result, students received consistent access to evidence-based reading foundational skills curriculum, and showed growth on the i-Ready Reading Diagnostic throughout the course of the school year. Students improved in Phonological Awareness (from 92% early on grade level and above to 98%), Phonics (from 74% to 90%), High-frequency Words (from 87% to 97%), and Vocabulary (from 63% to 83%). These different curricular resources will continue to be a focus in every Sunny Hills classroom in the future with an increased focus on developing vocabulary particularly in our intermediate classrooms.
• Targeted instruction in Really Great Reading and the use of the Orton-Gillingham instructional approach
  • In the 2020-21 school year, Sunny Hills Certificated support staff and leadership began training in the Orton-Gillingham instructional approach, and still more Sunny Hills teachers are completing the LETRS training this year. Additionally, along with the implementation of Success Blocks and our Tier 1 Reading Foundational Skills curriculum, beginning in the 2021-22 school year, Sunny Hills served approximately 40 students with our Tier 2 Really Great Reading curriculum from a combination of trained classroom teachers, our Intervention Specialist and Special Education teachers, who served still more students in reading with the Orton-Gillingham approach. These actions made a positive impact as students participating in these interventions made great strides in reading as demonstrated in outcomes such as the 22.1% increase in students meeting proficiency on the Smarter Balanced ELA assessment from the Students with Disabilities subgroup between the 2021 and 2022 school years. In spite of gains such as this, significant disproportionalities continue to exist and we must continue to look further to address this in the future.

• Coming to end of our previous School Improvement Plan in spring 2022, students in 3^rd-5^th grade classes completed the Smarter Balanced ELA assessment and 85% of all students demonstrated proficiency. This data represented a 7% improvement from the original Spring 2018 baseline measurement and a 3% improvement from the previous 3-year average reported in Sunny Hills’ Washington School Improvement Framework data. While we celebrate this improvement, it does fall short of our previous goal for 10% improvement on the Smarter Balanced ELA assessment. As a result, even while Sunny Hills is transitioning towards a School Improvement goal in math, our work in reading, including the actions listed above, continues to be a focus for our school team. More specifically, we must continue to work on addressing disproportionalities in our school data.

Although we recognize recent improvement in the disproportionality observed in data from the performance of students on the Smarter Balanced ELA assessment across several subgroups, such as that shared above, we must continue this improvement in the future. By continuing to engage in the actions of our previous School Improvement Plan, while also continuing to pursue new solutions and further developing existing systems we believe we can further reduce disproportionalities in the performance of all students in reading at Sunny Hills.