By Joe Ragusa

NORMAL – Parkside Elementary School has been honored for helping low-income students perform in the classroom.

Former Parkside Elementary School principal and current Kingsley Junior High School principal Shelly Erickson served as principal at Parkside between 2006 and 2014. She helped change the way reading was taught at the school.

“We started teaching reading to students in small groups and we really made sure that we got them in text that was at their level,” Erickson said. “You can’t learn to read better if I’m giving you material that is way too hard so you can only read a few words at a time. That’s not how it works.”

Erickson said the change helped reduce instances of bad behavior at the school.

“The first few years I was there, I had over 300 referrals for behavior,” Erickson said. “By the time I left, it was around 100.”

The National Title I Foundation honored Parkside and Healy Elementary School in Chicago during it’s annual conference last week for helping low-income students. Erickson said the honor certainly validates what the school has done with its reading program.

“I think that educators don’t get that frequently enough,” Erickson said. “My teachers and my staff worked so, so hard to be responsive to student needs. Teaching kids to read, you change their lives. You change their lives for the better.”

Erickson said the new reading program focuses a lot on nonfiction since that’s what people encounter more often in everyday life. She said several other Unit 5 schools, including Kingsley Junior High, have instituted a similar program.

Joe Ragusa can be reached at [email protected].