The Kloiber Foundation
Winter of 2014 Initiative
In the winter of 2014 Kloiber Foundation has continued supplying much needed aid to deserving local schools. Yates Elementary is another Lexington school faced with many challenges. The educators at Yates were looking to change and improve their approach to reading and math education, based on student performance falling significantly below the required state measures for several years.
While the school overall had seen marked improvement through the use of several reading and math software programs, for both the general classes and as intervention programs for students performing markedly below standard, they were having trouble making the programs available. Yates has seen consistent, quantifiable improvement applying certain programs to certain groups but lacked the funding to keep up all of the subscriptions they needed. Also they faced a problem not unfamiliar to many schools in Fayette County: too many students for too few computers.
Addressing both of these problems was something with which Kloiber Foundation could help. With a solid plan and evidence of past improvement the school’s three most successful learning software programs, Lexia CORE5, FASTT Math, and Dreambox were paid up for the next three years. To make sure that every child who needed access to these programs could get it, six mobile laptop carts were provided, each with a complement of thirty brand new computers each. The computer cart’s mobility also addresses an issue they were experiencing with making computers available to the portable classrooms they have to use for the overflow of students currently in attendance.
In addition to the few desktops in each classroom and the computer lab, the 180 laptops now at their disposal will allow Yates to more effectively implement these various learning software programs. To facilitate the type of individual learning that Yates has found effective, they are also receiving 150 headphones for use with their various computers. This way the scholars should have an easier time concentrating on their own tasks and not be as distracted by the rest of the classroom. Hopefully with these tools at Yates’ disposal, the next three years will show dramatic improvement as well as provide solutions that can be applied in schools with similar challenges.