Polk County Public Schools, Staff
Our goal as a district is to ensure that every teacher of reading elementary, middle and high has the knowledge, the skills and the necessary tools for teaching all students to read. Our efforts are focused on ways to prevent early reading failure and to provide timely interventions to struggling readers. Professional development activities include training for our content area teachers at the middle and high levels. Our intent is to make reading everybody’s business.
Click here for K-12 Reading Contact Information.
Governor Jeb Bush signed an Executive Order in 2001 establishing the Just Read, Florida! state wide reading initiative. As part of this order spoke to establishing of a pool of highly qualified reading teachers through the acquisition of a reading endorsement, which consists of 300 in-service points or 15 semester hours of college credit.
Click here for more information on Reading Endorsement
Polk County is one of the state’s Pilot districts for the Reading Coach model, Florida’s springboard for the Reading First initiative.
Two of the most important goals in the district’s Strategic Plan are opportunity to learn and monitoring of student progress. There is strong support in our district for the Just Read, Florida! K-12 Comprehensive Research-Based Reading Plan, as the plan provides a clear direction and a focus for enhancing the existing reading initiatives in our elementary, middle, and high schools. Schools are expected to implement a balanced reading program at every grade level in every school in the district. The district will provide training and facilitate the incorporation of the K-12 Reading Program. Through appropriate assessment and progress monitoring students will receive rigorous and relevant reading instruction.
Ongoing progress monitoring of student achievement is the focus. Professional development activities will relate to assessments and interpretations of the assessment data to drive instructional decisions at the district, at the classroom and at the school.
Our goal as a district is to ensure that every teacher of reading elementary, middle and high has the knowledge, the skills and the necessary tools for teaching all students to read. Our efforts are focused on ways to prevent early reading failure and to provide timely interventions to struggling readers. Professional development activities include training for our content area teachers at the middle and high levels. Our intent is to make reading everybody’s business.
We do know that our district is becoming more increasingly diverse. This recognized diversity of students requires diverse teaching styles that do not stray from research-based practices. To that end, our teachers need both the knowledge base about how children learn to read and the ability to draw upon a variety of effective scientific research-based reading strategies to provide effective reading instruction for all children—including ESE and LEP.
The Reading Coach Model is implemented at the elementary, middle, and high levels in our district. All of our schools are provided the services of a reading coach. These services have proven to be invaluable in our efforts to improve student achievement and to increase the level of proficient readers.
Our true mission is to ensure rigorous and relevant learning experiences for the students. We believe, as a district, that these learning experiences will result in high student achievement.
In August 2009, the Florida Department of Education made new Florida Assessments for Instruction in Reading available to K-12 public schools free of charge.
It was developed by the Florida Center for Reading Research (FCRR) in collaboration with Just Read, Florida! Department.
This new assessment system provides teachers with screening, progress monitoring and diagnostic information that is essential to guiding reading instruction.
For more information, go to fcrr.org