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Success Story: Gateway Middle School, St. Louis, MO

Gateway Middle School is one of several schools in the St. Louis district to have adopted the AutoSkill Academy of READING software program. The program has met with particular success at Gateway and educators at the school continue to report positive results.

Rebecca Kettenacker sees on a daily basis the impact the Academy of READING has on students at Gateway Middle School, a technology magnet school for grades six to eight. Kettenacker, the program's facilitator and software administrator, works in her computer lab with 42 sixth-grade students identified as problem readers.

"My lab services both ESL students who require English language phonetics and students who, though not in Special Education, read at a one to five grade level," says Kettenacker. "The students meet for 40-minute sessions three times a week. I set each student's curriculum on Autopilot and then adjust accordingly."

She explains that many of these students need basic sound- and letter-identification skills to 'see' the foreign sounds to which they're listening. "We find the Academy of READING especially helpful for these students," she says, adding, "Non-readers especially like the video guides and animated visual instructions the program provides."

Eurania Jackson is another teacher whose students benefit from the Academy of READING; some of her eighth-graders use its comprehension module. As one of Gateway's communication-arts teachers, Jackson helps administer the diagnostic tests to identify students with reading difficulties.

"By helping students focus on key words in paragraphs," she says, "the Academy of READING enables students to find words more quickly which results in enhanced comprehension on the standardized tests students must later take."

Now after several semesters of using the program, Rebecca Kettenacker says she wants to begin documenting "hard statistics" on students' reading progress, using MAP and Terra Nova test scores. "My next step is to meet with all communication arts teachers and review the scores each fall and winter semester." She adds, "Gateway also wants to implement the Academy of READING in grade seven, to bridge the non-reading gap between grades six and eight."