Home > Successes > SuccessMaker & Waterford > Walter Matthys Elementary School

Location

• Walter Matthys Elementary School is located in an urban area of South Houston, Texas.

District and School Description

• Matthys Elementary is part of the Pasadena Independent School District enrolling 46,000 students.
• Fifty-five percent of the population are English language learners.
• Approximately 82 percent receive a free and reduced-price lunch.

Number of Students

• There are approximately 918 students enrolled at Matthys Elementary.

Grade Levels

• The school serves students in pre-kindergarten through fifth grade.

Ethnic Breakdown

• The ethnic makeup of the student population is approximately
  • 89 percent Hispanic
  • 8 percent Caucasian
  • 2 percent African-American
  • 1 percent Asian.

Challenges Presented

• Matthys needed to find meaningful differentiated work for students as they rotated in small groups.

Solution

SuccessMaker® from Pearson Digital Learning was implemented at Matthys in the spring of 2003. The program offers a powerful combination of management system, assessment, and curriculum resources to provide administrators, teachers, and students with tools to improve academic performance. Eight hundred and fifty of the 920 students use SuccessMaker. Courses include: Math Concepts and Skills, English and Spanish, Story Painter, Vamos a leer, Reading Adventures Primary, Reading Adventures, and Reader’s Workshop. Students use SuccessMaker as part of small group daily classroom rotations.

In addition to students using SuccessMaker, the school also implemented the Waterford Early Reading Program™ from Pearson Digital Learning in the spring of 2001. It is being used for reading intervention in grades K-1. Sixty kindergarteners and 15 first graders use the prgram every day, with each user session lasting 15 minutes. "The kindergarten teachers all believe that our students are making great gains in reading. This is substantiated through our KTips nine week assessments and through the Texas Primary Reading Instrument," says Hickman.

Results

Major strategies for improving student achievement at Matthys included:

• Curriculum and academic goals such as communicating curriculum to teachers, holding campus curriculum meetings, parent and student communication, and academic goal setting.
• Staff selection, leadership, and capacity building such as hiring great teachers and treating them professionally, encouraging leadership, and concentrating on professional development.
• Meeting criteria for choosing instructional programs and practices such as doing research and assuring the program is teacher-friendly.
• Monitoring student progress and effectively determining strengths and weaknesses through compiling, analyzing, and utilizing data to target instruction.

Matthys Elementary and Pearson Digital Learning: A True Partnership.
In the words of Karen Hickman, Principal

Pearson Digital Learning’s Services and Support groups have been instrumental in training my staff on using SuccessMaker and Waterford to best meet the needs of Matthys students. Following the original start-up training, we have worked together to train new teachers and also to continue the training of my experienced teachers. My trainer has been completely flexible and has geared the training to exactly what my campus needs. She also provides feedback to me about how the programs can be better utilized. Our trainer’s expertise is invaluable. My sales representative has also been very helpful in trying to work out the best configurations to meet the needs of my students, and has provided guidance and assistance when choosing what I need to purchase in both hardware and software. I truly have a wonderful educational partnership with Pearson Digital Learning.

Walter Matthys Elementary School is proud of its many accomplishments and the staff has vowed to stick with what’s working—like using SuccessMaker and Waterford.

Contact us for additional information on how Pearson Digital Learning can help you achieve results with SuccessMaker Enterprise and Waterford Early Learning Program.