YALLAHS High School in St Thomas has crafted a unique literacy programme that its principal, Mark Malabver, says has been positively impacting students who cannot read or are doing so way below their grade level.

Malabver heaped praises on the school’s Enrichment Department and the teachers responsible for the Alternative Pathways to Secondary Education (APSE) programme for turning around these students. Come September, the programme will be in its third year.

When the batch of 123 seventh graders arrived at the institution in September last year, 81 per cent or approximately 99 of them were reading below their level, said Malbaver.

“The team was able to craft a programme that has essentially driven the transformation in terms of the low literacy and numeracy levels of our students at grade seven. A lot of what we have done has been trial and error. I say kudos to the enrichment department and the Alternative Pathways to Secondary Education department,” Malabver said, explaining that usually when the Ministry of Education does an assessment of students leaving grade six in primary school, many of them when they get to high school are actually reading below what the ministry’s report indicates.

He stated that what the school has to do in a case like that, is do its own internal assessment and this is how they realise the shortfalls.

“We recognise that the situation was far worse than what the ministry had sent and as such, we had to take a strategic step in terms of looking at the subject offerings and peeling back several of the subjects. When you have 81 per cent of the students not at the level where they are to be, it speaks to the failure of the education system, collectively. What we found was that the Enrichment Department and the APSE coaches have really done a superb job to turn this around because from September to May, in terms of moving the students forward, it’s really phenomenal and we were able to achieve this with very limited to no resources,“ he said.

“We have Internet challenges and behavioural challenges. In spite of that we were able to adapt and be resilient and utilise the meagre resources we had, in order to pull up the students. If we were able to achieve this without the resources, imagine what we could do if we had the resources. The students are going to come to us in the way they come to us. What we are asking for is the resources. We have highly qualified and highly committed teachers to do the job but we need the infrastructural support, the resource support to move the students along,” Malabver said.

Malabver, who is president-elect for the Jamaica Teachers’ Association, shared that the Enrichment Department, in collaboration with the APSE team, took the initiative to create books that are specifically geared towards improving the literacy levels of the students who fall within this group of concern.

“One of the things we have done is that in the department we have created these books to help with the intervention. Each student was required to buy the book based on their reading level. Miss Jodi-Ann Lawes, head of the department, created this and it went a far way. We have Internet challenges and behavioural challenges. In spite of that, we were able to adapt and be resilient and utilise the meagre resources we had to pull the students up.

“If we were able to achieve this without the resources, imagine what we could do if we had the resources to achieve it. The students are going to come to us in the way they come to us. What we are asking for is the resources. We have highly qualified and highly committed teachers to do the job but we need the infrastructural support, the resource support to move the students along. It cannot be that we are left in the way that we have been left to fend on our own with limited resources to do these things,” Malabver added.

Explaining a bit about how the literacy programme works and the impact it has, Judith Green, who is the APSE coach at Yallahs High, said when new students come in, they are placed in specific classes based on their reading levels. She shared that the school has six grade seven classes, of which four were designated as pathway three classes. Pathway three means those students were not quite ready for the rigours of high school work, and would need intervention. According to her, each class would have no more than 25 students.

“These students are at the age level but not at the reading level, so we have to do re-mediation. We have some students who are slow learners with special needs. We would get some of those students. We have had non-readers, students who come and can’t read any at all and don’t know letters or letter sounds. When we are finished with them they are able to identify these things and say them. Even after we do this, we will still have to work with them because it is not a quick fix. The reading level we want to get them to is at least a grade four level because at that level, you can say they are literate.

“There was this little boy who was in grade eight in the lowest stream. For two years he was at the non-starter level which means that he was not able to read any of the sight words. We have been working with him daily. I have seen significant improvement in that young man. The young man was able to read words he could not read before like am, I, go, is, you and up. At first, we thought he had a mental challenge. He was about 14. At 14, if you don’t know any of these words, that is an indicator that something is going wrong with the brain. I saw a marked improvement in this young man and I am really, really proud of him. It might not sound like a great thing but in the reading world it is a great thing,” she said.

Meanwhile Lawes told the Jamaica Observer that she believes that COVID-19 affected that students’ ability to read significantly.

“If, for example, the student didn’t get the right foundation from grade one, two and three, it is going to affect them all the way up to high school and I think we saw that when we did the test in grade seven,” she said.

“In the intervention programme we deliberately grouped the students based on their reading level and we paired them with enrichment teachers. They did eight sessions of literacy for the entire week and each session is 40 minutes. After the intervention there was an increase in the levels. While we had a lot of readers at the bottom, we saw the readers move to midsection and to the higher level of the reading band. More students were reading above the lowest levels,” Lawes added.