MONTAGUE — The Montague school board heard a presentation regarding a potential change to its elementary school english language arts (ELA) curriculum at its regular meeting Monday evening.
The presentation was led by Oehrli Elementary School principal Sandie Lundquist, but also included commentary from teachers who were part of the team that have spent a lot of time during the 2023-24 and 2024-25 school years selecting and piloting two curricula in their classrooms.
The school board will receive financial documents on the potential change in the next month and will likely take a vote on it at its May meeting.
The potential change has been one Lundquist said she'd heard a lot of feedback in support of making since arriving at Montague for the '23-'24 school year, as she and her teaching staff felt the current curriculum could be improved, especially with regard to consistency across grade levels. She and a team of teachers, helped by a state grant, have spent a lot of time since the beginning of that school year going through the process of selecting an alternative.
The team used a book called Shifting the Balance: 6 Ways to Bring the Science of Reading into the Balanced Literacy Classroom as a guide as it studied potential alternatives in 2023-24, then met over the summer to select two curricula that would be piloted in 2024-25. To ensure fairness and consistency, teachers from each elementary grade level were part of the pilot program.
The two curricula piloted were called EL Education and Bookworms, and while the team found positives in both, it was "unanimous," according to first-grade teacher Tracie Wolffis, in recommending Bookworms, a curriculum that was profiled in Forbes magazine in 2024 as having produced impressive results in school districts nationwide. The teachers were impressed with the program's ease of organization for teachers, which they felt would make a simpler process for onboarding current and future teachers into the curriculum, and also appreciated its focus on student collaboration and engagement.
Assuming the curriculum is approved, a further benefit in selecting Bookworms, according to the presentation, is that teachers will be able to train in the curriculum directly from its creator, Sharon Walpole, this summer in preparation for the next school year. Coincidentally, the North Muskegon school district is making the same curriculum change, and the two districts are able to make the training sessions work financially by splitting the cost.
Lundquist emphasized how seriously each member of the team took the process of selecting a new curriculum, given that it will be being taught to students for the next several years.
Elsewhere in the board meeting, the board unanimously approved the 2025-26 school calendar, which will be similar to this year's with one change; midwinter break will now be Monday-Wednesday, Feb. 16-18, rather than beginning the preceding Friday, to align with other schools in the Muskegon Area Intermediate School District.
The board also unanimously approved two different purchases for batches of Chromebooks from Sehi Computer Services, one that will be used at Oehrli and the other at NBC Middle School. The two sets of books consist of 620 combined devices for a cost of just under $190,000. Both were purchased to replace current devices that are approaching the end of their projected life cycles. The larger batch - 420 Chromebooks - will not arrive until after July 1, but the district is ordering them now to guard against expected price increases.
One more purchase unanimously approved was two electric generators at a total cost of $60,548 from Wolverine Power. The generators will be used at NBC as a backup to ensure cafeteria food there wouldn't be damaged by a power outage. The district also has that system in place at the high school but does not yet have one at the Montague Area Childhood Center, though it plans to add one in the future. There will be further costs for installation once the generators are ready, but like the generators themselves, that will be paid for by the district's food service fund.
