With the new school year, the first phase of the Response to Intervention for elementary reading began for all schools throughout Delaware. While the implementation process is different for all districts and charter schools, the focus of RtI is to assess and monitor students throughout the school year and catch those students who may be struggling and provide them with the extra help they need to succeed. The assessments used for benchmarking, progress monitoring, and diagnostics varies between districts. However, each district will need a solution to adequately organize the assessment data so timely and accurate data-driven decisions about each student can be made.
In March 2008, representatives from Colonial, Red Clay Consolidated, and Appoquinimink School Districts met with the Data Service Center to develop an online Response to Intervention solution. The end result of all of the hard work is I-Tracker Pro, the DSC’s newest application. Although developed to assist school staff in tracking Response to Intervention data and intervention plans, I-Tracker Pro’s functionality will also track attendance data, discipline data, standardized test reports, and health screening data. Thus becoming a total intervention solution.
The versatile system allows teachers, school staff, and district administrators to track and log interventions related to RtI. I-Tracker Pro allows users with appropriate security levels to obtain a breakdown of how the students in their class or school performed on the assessment. The School Problem Solving Team can create an intervention plan for individual students who require Tier 2 or Tier 3 interventions. The Team will also have the means to easily schedule students to interventions at particular times and days of the week. Homogeneous groups for students in Tier 2 and Tier 3 can be efficiently formed utilizing online reports. Since taking attendance for RtI is federally mandated, I-Tracker Pro makes it extremely easy for teachers and interventionists to quickly complete student attendance. Finally, the system allows Teachers and Interventionists to efficiently log intervention progress assessments and view student progress through a variety of charts and graphs.
As the Districts come to the end of the first RtI cycle, Reading Interventionists and teachers will make recommendations about their students’ progress. I-Tracker Pro’s end of cycle processing allows staff to efficiently review each student’s progress toward their goals, make recommendations for the student’s next RtI placement, copy and edit intervention groups, and then add students to the groups.
The implementation for the three districts was extremely successful and DSC has received positive feedback about the system’s ease of use and the wealth of data readily available to make instructional recommendations. With I-Tracker Pro, school staff can easily organize the data used to screen, differentiate, and provide interventions effectively for all students within their districts. Since RtI is currently focusing on reading in Kindergarten through fifth grade, I-Tracker Pro follows suit. However, the system will eventually encompass all grades and track student progress in math and reading.
If you would like more information about I-Tracker Pro or if you would like to see an application demonstration, please call Steve Reynolds at (302) 504-7228 or e-mail him at sreynolds@dataservice.org.
