Overview of District Improvement Efforts

For more than five years, the Painesville City Local Schools have been engaged in a comprehensive process of district-wide improvement supported by the Ohio Improvement Process. Painesville’s intensive efforts to identify, understand, and address the issues impacting district performance led to a multi-faceted campaign of instructional improvement. The improvement strategies embraced by the district center on five main areas:

• District-wide curriculum strategies to scaffold improvement,
• Key structures to support improvement efforts,
• Leadership to guide and sustain improvement,
• Development of a district-wide shared vision, and
• Responsiveness to district families.

Curriculum Strategies to Scaffold Improvement

The Painesville City Local Schools developed and deployed a district-wide instructional framework that includes strategies to bolster the reading and language arts program and practices to support student learning. Key components of the literacy and language arts program include:

• guided reading, centerpiece of the elementary language arts program, providing differentiated and leveled instruction, and using cognitive processing tools and graphic organizers to support chunking, comprehension, and interpretation;
• Leveled Literacy Intervention (LLI), intensive short-term intervention providing daily, small-group instruction that supplements the classroom literacy program;
• use of formative and summative assessment to inform instruction, supported by extensive professional development for teachers; and
• programs for differentiating instruction and monitoring progress, as well as cultivating independent reading and writing.

Painesville also has implemented practices and structures to support student learning, including standards-based grading, Positive Behavioral Intervention and Supports (PBIS), and academic supports for English Learners (ELs). The district’s new standards-based grading system aligns assessment practices with the applicable Ohio Learning Standards; closes the loop between instruction, assessment, and grades; and unifies instruction and assessment across the district.