When the first day of school arrives this fall, incoming kindergartners in Lehighton Area School District won’t be walking into a permanent classroom. Instead, they’ll spend their opening weeks being watched.

That’s by design.

The district is launching a new kindergarten placement model this fall that delays permanent classroom assignments until teachers have had the chance to observe every student across every classroom. It is a structured, multi-week process that administrators say will produce better-balanced classes and stronger academic outcomes from the start.

New approach

The approach was presented last Monday to the school board by Tricia Foster, principal of intervention and achievement K-5; Aaron Sebelin, principal K-2; and kindergarten teacher Drewann Troutman.

“If we don’t design for success, we are planning for intervention,” Foster said, describing the philosophy behind the shift.

The problem with the traditional model, administrators said, is that it relies on too little information. Students who register in June are assessed at that time, but a summer’s worth of growth — social, emotional and academic — goes unobserved before they walk through the door in September. Some students never make it to registration at all, arriving in the fall with no data on file.

“Even though we have that initial testing, we know how much and how fast kids grow from June until August,” Sebelin said. “We don’t have a lot of data on what that kid looks like. How do they leave their parents, can they separate, how do they get off the bus, what’s their stamina, how do they attend?”

About 10% of incoming students fall into that no-data category, administrators estimated, whether because they move into the district over the summer, miss their registration appointment or simply can’t complete the assessment on the day they come in.

“Some kids come in and they can’t separate, and we can’t force them to take the test,” Sebelin said. “We don’t want school to be, in their minds, a negative place.”

Under the new four-phase model, all incoming kindergartners will be placed into initial classrooms at the start of the year, but those assignments are temporary.

During the structured observation phase, the students stay put while the teachers rotate. Each of the eight kindergarten teachers will cycle through all eight classrooms and observe every child using a common rubric. The rubric uses a simple 1-to-3 scale, rated as emerging, developing or consistent, with space for notes the presentation calls “noticings” to add context beyond the numbers.

Observations will take place across multiple settings including whole group instruction, small groups, transitions, lunch and recess, to build a complete picture of each child. Reading specialists, counselors, psychologists, social workers, speech therapists and occupational and physical therapists will also be brought in at a midpoint team check to identify students who may need closer attention before final placements are made.

What teachers will be looking for goes well beyond whether a child knows their letters. Monday’s presentation identified six observation focus areas: academic readiness, social interaction, self-regulation, communication, response to instruction and what the presenters called “learning-to-learn behaviors.” That category includes persistence with challenging tasks, willingness to take risks, task initiation and follow-through, flexibility and adaptability, and independence versus reliance on adults.

“When kids come in with varying levels of skill sets in kindergarten, they can have academic readiness but socially not have those skill sets, or vice versa,” Sebelin said. “We want to look at all of these.”

Once the observation period concludes, teachers will collaborate to design final classroom rosters.

KG teachers excited

Administrators were careful Monday to define what the program is not. The process is not intended to label students, create extra long-term work for teachers or add unnecessary complexity to the start of the year.

Troutman, one of the eight kindergarten teachers who will carry out the plan, told the board the new approach reflects a broader shift in how the profession thinks about the earliest years of school.

“This is an exciting time in education where we’re really getting to see so many new developments with the science of reading, and we’re placing our kids going into first grade so intentionally and differently,” Troutman said. “Kindergarten, we get the pleasure of launching them into such an adventure in education, and that should be exciting and joyful and a time for curiosity to bloom — for the student, the staff and their families.”

She added that the demands of balancing a room full of 5-year-olds with wildly different needs had made the case for the new model on its own terms.

“This year was probably a very transformative year for myself, having a myriad of different needs in my room,” Troutman said. “As a mother of three, I’ve always wanted to quadruple myself. Balanced classrooms would lead to much more instructional time.”

Sebelin framed the anticipated results in straightforward terms: balanced classrooms lead to teacher efficacy, teacher efficacy leads to a better classroom environment, and a better classroom environment leads to student achievement.

“We aren’t just placing kids,” Sebelin said. “This is not like designing classrooms just to place and sort children. We’re literally looking at how we get every learner that walks through those doors to access, engage in and succeed within our tailored instruction.”