READING RECOVERY ISSUES RESOLVED AT JACKSON

FRUITLAND -- The 40-minute drive three nights a week for her son's tutoring takes its toll on Shelly Stone.

She has four children at home and is a foster parent for others. She works in Cape Girardeau daily, teaching special education. She is a room mother for her son and a former Parent-Teacher Organization president.

But the difference in 7-year-old Trey Stone's reading makes the trip worthwhile, Stone said. He goes to Cape Girardeau for special Reading Recovery classes, which provide one-on-one sessions for first-graders who have difficulty with the basics of reading.

The cost of Trey's tutoring and mileage on the Stone's full-size van is well over $100 a month, but it is money the family is willing to pay.

"Before Reading Recovery, we would tell him to get his reading book out and he would start crying," Stone said. "It would be so frustrating trying to work with him. Now he gets his books out and wants to read to us."

The Reading Recovery program is considerably easier for some Jackson students and their parents. Twelve first-graders who attend Orchard Elementary School currently get the services for free during the school day. Students in the district's outlying schools -- the ones in Fruitland, Millersville and Gordonville -- only have remedial reading classes.

Fred Jones, assistant superintendent of Jackson Public Schools, said that situation will change within weeks. He said the concerns raised by Stone and another mother, Deborah Spradlin, made the district examine its Reading Recovery policy.

Stone and Spradlin both had sons in the same kindergarten class in Jackson. Both later went to North Elementary School in Fruitland, attending its sole first-grade class.

Neither mother had any idea her son was having trouble reading until notes were sent home saying the boys had been placed in a remedial reading class.

"The kindergarten teacher always just said Trey was `all boy,'" Bill Stone, Trey's father, said. "She never identified any academic problems."

When the Stone and Spradlin families found out about their boys' placement in remedial reading, they checked with the teachers to find out the reason. Deborah Spradlin attended an open house and spoke with the remedial reading teacher, who showed her a list of test scores that landed her son, Steven Spradlin, and Trey into remedial reading.

Spradlin said she remembers her son's score being 86 and Trey's being 89.

But when Shelly Stone later asked to see the test, she was told it had been thrown away, she said. A slip of paper in his records said it was 97, too high to qualify for Reading Recovery services.

Even if his score was lower, the school district's three Reading Recovery teachers were placed at Orchard Elementary School in Jackson. A list of scores demonstrate that at least five remedial reading students at Orchard with test scores higher than Steven Spradlin's received Reading Recovery services.

At the October meeting of the Jackson School Board, the Stone and Spradlin families made two demands. First, they wanted a certified teacher's aide in their boys' classroom so that the students could get more one-on-one instruction for reading. Second, they wanted the opportunity for Reading Recovery services opened to students throughout the district.

The board hired an aide the next day and placed her in North Elementary's first grade.

However, Bill Stone said he got passed from one administrator to another on the Reading Recovery issue.

"They talked about correcting the problem, but they didn't put anyone in charge of it and they didn't put a time line on it," he said.

As late as Wednesday afternoon, the Stones didn't know that the district was testing students from all elementary schools for two slots in the Reading Recovery program. The slots should be open in weeks, the assistant superintendent said.

"To implement the program, we had to concentrate on just one building," Jones said. "To fully implement this program in the schools, we would have needed six new teachers. We were understaffed. But the complaint that we didn't offer to bring students from the outlying areas into town for the program has some merit."

Each of the three Reading Recovery teachers at Orchard this year can work with four students. As the students recover and go back to a normal classroom workload, their places will be filled by students who were recommended by their teachers and who scored the lowest on Reading Recovery evaluations.

If a qualifying student is from an outlying school, his parents will have the choice of placing him in an Orchard first-grade class or not participating in Reading Recovery.

A fourth teacher for the program likely will be hired next year and used to deliver services in outlying schools, Jones said.

When she heard about the plan Wednesday night, Shelly Stone was still skeptical.

"If this holds true, I think it's great, but I'll have to see it to believe it," she said. "We asked in the past and there was no possibility. It's hard to believe it is suddenly going to happen."