With the help of the Department of Defense (DOD), Yelm Community Schools (YCS) is working to tackle an issue that often goes overlooked: military-connected students with additional literacy needs.
The school district recently received a $1.25 million grant from the DOD to improve literacy and support for military-connected students, providing intensive staff training, improved assessment, targeted instruction and tailored interventions.
Kendall McNutt, YCS director of student learning, said the grant will support not only military-connected students but all students in the district. The primary focus of the funding is on literacy and equipping teachers with opportunities to teach students with additional needs the basics of reading.
“Joint Base Lewis-McChord is something of a magnet for families who have family members who have exceptional needs. We have a disproportionate number of military-connected students who have additional needs, and they oftentimes choose Yelm schools,” McNutt said. “Reading is super challenging, and so it’s helpful for teachers when they have an understanding of what that process looks like.”
At both the elementary and secondary levels, the district provide teachers with more training on how to help students reach their required reading efficiency levels. McNutt said that military-connected students are often left behind because they are “good at hiding” their struggles in the classroom, and their learning is interrupted because of their frequent relocations.
“Kids who get into middle school and high school without being able to read have incredible coping skills. They are really good at masking that because we, as a society, kind of don’t accept people not being able to read,” she said. “They’re trying to keep up. They are paying attention in class, but they’ve managed to sort of just hide their reading ability.”
With the grant funding, secondary teachers would get professional development in how to teach the fundamentals of reading, which, McNutt said, they’re not often trained how to do because students are expected to read at their grade level.
“The whole grant is written around literacy, and so it will help support a dedicated staff member who will be able to really look at our full system and find any gaps,” she said. “You don’t expect that an older student is going to have really profound gaps in reading. Certainly, [some] might struggle with it, or it may not be their favorite thing and they need more help, but you expect that they would have the basic ability to read.
“What’s nice is that there’s more national conversation around this, which means that hopefully they’re going to land somewhere where those conversations are going to happen,” McNutt continued. “We can only control the time we have with them, and so we need to be paying close attention to what that looks like for them and getting them as far as we can.”
YCS has received over $5 million from eight different grants from the DOD, and Yelm is the only grantee in the region that has received every award attempted. McNutt, who has worked on acquiring six of the eight grants, appreciates the care for Yelm students that the DOD has shown over the years.
“They have been a tremendous resource to our district and to Yelm and to our kids. In Yelm, Washington, they have no reason to have ever heard of us before, and they reach out and call us,” McNutt said. “We never take it for granted that we’re gonna get an award. It’s a pretty big honor that they’ve chosen us every time we’ve tried.”
