John Ashley School Principal Serenity Greenwood presents to the West Springfield School Committee on May 5.
Photo credit: West Side Media
WEST SPRINGFIELD — The John Ashley School in West Springfield is working hard to ensure academic growth in the young students for the 2025-2026 school year and the data certainly proves it.
John Ashley School Principal Serenity Greenwood gave a presentation on the data and school climate at the School Committee meeting on May 5.
Greenwood’s presentation was organized by strategic priorities, such as the school’s commitment to inclusive practices, rigorous and equitable instruction and the targeted support necessary to ensure success for every student.
She began by showing data for the school’s strategy of rigorous and equitable instruction in pre-K. Greenwood compared data results from two studies on literacy and math skills, one done at the beginning of the year and the other in the middle of the year.
Students who met expectations in literacy increased about 35% and students who met expectations in math increased about 40% since the beginning of the year. Greenwood said the end of year assessments will be done in the next few weeks.
The school also used Heggerty, a phonemic research program, to study the same skillsets and provide more specific data on which topic areas students excelled at most.
“It shows us that our highest skill areas tend to be around blending syllables, putting our words together and segmenting,” Greenwood said. “Our lowest performing skill, according to the data we have right now, is on isolating ending sounds, which developmentally is typically more of a mid-to-late kindergarten skill anyways.”
She detailed the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills test, which is a set of assessments used to measure foundational reading and literacy skills like phonics and oral reading.
The data had the same beginning and middle-of-year format and showed a 12% increase of students at benchmark skill and a 10% increase of students above benchmark.
Greenwood also presented data showcasing the impact that the work going on in pre-K classrooms has on the kindergarten data.
“You can see the impact of the [John Ashley] pre-K is evident in the data,” Greenwood said. “The students who attended the John Ashley pre-K outperformed their peers in our JA kindergarten across all benchmarks.”
Fifty-four percent of students from the John Ashley pre-K program were at or above benchmark, compared to the 23% students, at or above benchmark, who did not attend pre-K at the school.
“I wanted to pull this for you so that you can see the efforts that have gone into putting together the pre-K program, and what it’s doing for our data and getting our students ready for kindergarten and the years beyond,” Greenwood said. “At the middle of the year, you can see we went from 49% to 69% for our students that attended the JA pre-K, so I was really excited about that … I know everybody is under a lot of stress trying to figure out where the money goes and how it’s utilized, and I just really felt that this was a nice time to highlight and celebrate that this is a place where our taxpayers’ money and our district’s efforts are making a remarkable difference.”
Greenwood said that students need to feel comfortable and safe in the classroom and presented examples of the school’s methods that were used to accomplish that this year.
Some methods to ensure a good social, emotional and behavioral health include learning groups for emotional regulation, social skills and coping, structured sessions using a therapy dog to practice empathy and positive social interaction and individual counseling by school-based clinicians for students needing extra support.
