The Mitchell School Board met in regular session on Monday, April 22, 2024, with several items on their agenda. One of those items was the question of whether to hire three literacy coaches to the district payroll.
Dr. Joe Childs explained that literacy coaches are specialists in literacy and can assist teachers with in-service opportunities and provide direct instruction to small groups and individual students.
Literacy coaches will be in addition to those instructors already involved in the current Reading Recovery Program. Literacy coaches assist students in English, vocabulary, sentence structure and word usage as well as with reading skills.
The Board asked questions about whether literacy coaches were common practice in other districts, how much the program would cost and if the budget could accommodate the additional expense. Dr. Childs answered in the affirmative to all of those questions. Based on the average teacher salary and benefits package currently offered by the district, the total cost of adding three literacy coaches would be $210,000.
The three proposed literacy coaches will be hired for school year 2024-25, which begins in August, with one literacy coach assigned to each of Mitchell’s three elementary schools.