The Rowan-Salisbury School System, which serves approximately 20,000 students, is located in the Piedmont region of North Carolina. Under the leadership of Superintendent Dr. Lynn Moody, the district is in the middle of a three-year strategic plan to improve reading and literacy while actively engaging students and teachers. The plan started in 2014, when the district began a digital conversion initiative to put a new laptop or tablet into the hands of every student in grades 3-12. By 2017, the district aims to have 90% of its students reading on or above grade level and 100% achieving or exceeding one year’s growth annually.
The Rowan-Salisbury School System and Achieve3000 have partnered to implement Achieve3000’s literacy solutions district-wide. Included with the solutions are instructional resources and professional development for educators, a real-time data dashboard for administrators, and home support for parents and guardians.
Achieve3000 specializes in cloud-based, differentiated learning solutions for school-aged youth as well as adult learners.
Rowan-Salisbury Schools is implementing Achieve3000 solutions across all grades: Smarty Ants for grades PreK-1, KidBiz3000 for grades 2-5, TeenBiz3000 for grades 6-8, and Empower3000 for grades 9-12. As part of the partnership, the district is also receiving Spark3000, a solution designed for adult literacy and workforce readiness, at no cost. Each Achieve3000 solution combines embedded assessment, differentiated instruction, and regular skills practice to meet all students one-on-one, at their individual reading levels, and accelerate learning gains. In addition, because the solutions are cloud-based, students can use their new digital devices to access them anytime or anywhere, without an Internet connection.
Earlier this year, Achieve3000 released a new North Carolina Edition, a curriculum that’s aligned to the Common Core State Standards and includes built-in practice for the READY assessments. For teachers, the N.C. Edition features robust lesson plans and point-of-use resources to support learning without adding to their workload. A data dashboard called Leadership Edition is included for administrators, so they can monitor the Achieve3000 implementation and measure student reading gains. Families of Achieve3000 students will receive free access to the Home Edition, where they can view their child’s progress and access resources in 19 languages to support learning at home.
