(Beaver Dam) The Beaver Dam Unified School District recently named Beaver Dam High School as their School of the Month. District officials highlighted the English Language Arts school success plan goal, which included the introduction of Newsela at the beginning of the school year. Principal Russ Tronson says it is a program designed to provide content that matches a student’s reading level on the Lexile scale.
“So, they can be reading the same article, but it’ll adjust based on their Lexile,” says Tronson. “So, it helps them be able to comprehend the material a little bit better, and then as they continue their reading, they’ll boost their Lexile scores up as well.”
To date, there are currently 801 students participating, 7,561 articles have been reviewed, and 501 student annotations have been made. There have also been 632 quizzes completed and 689 responses have been written. Tronson says the school is happy with those numbers.
“It definitely could be way more than that,” Tronson says. “But, you know, primarily as a new resource I’m pleased with this because I had this resource in my last district, and I would say when we started it, we didn’t have as much engagement as we have had here in Beaver Dam.”
Tronson says he gives credit to the staff for trying the new resource and librarian Jen Vinz for bringing this resource to the high school.
