Before the start of the school year, almost 3000 Jefferson County teachers were trained on a new K through eight language arts curriculum.

We spoke to some Jefferson County teachers who were going through the training database.

Teachers are taking part in a K through eight ila training districtwide to ensure that we are ready for literacy going into next year and that we have a tier one ah common curriculum as we approach 2324 ELA is English language arts and that is most commonly people would refer to that as your phonics, phonemic awareness, your comprehension, your reading vocabulary and fluency.

We're looking at taking the curriculum from being like a mile wide to looking at taking the curriculum and making it a mound so that all students have access to authentic curriculum that students struggle with, which is what we want them to do.

They call it grappling in L. We've always called it the productive struggle.

But I think as they do that, it's really going to help students to deepen their understanding of things where they're not just at a surface level, but now they're evaluating them.

Before we had over 150 different curricula or different programs that were being used.

We never had a common language or consistent expectations across all grade levels.

So for the first time, we're able to speak a common language, have a common focus on literacy, address some of those foundational skill gaps that we've seen for so many years, but never had the chance to build momentum to address.

And you'll find teachers here for the first time get to collaborate across schools, not just in their school teams, which is really exciting.

When we look at the Council of Great City Schools, which were a part of, we also noticed that most of them were using a Tier one or core curriculum.

So we are now much more on pace with other districts our size to address those Tier one supports, which means all students are getting a Common Core curriculum at ELA.

We are such a huge district and we're very transient too.

So students go from one school to another.

So a child might go from high school to Joshua School and soon it might get lost.

But now with this new curriculum, if a student goes from my school to Joshua School or any school in the district, students are going to have that common language and they're going to be able to understand what they're doing.

And that is just monumental for our district.

So we've also encouraged subs to get train.

We're going to have another sub day for them to ensure that they're able to meet the needs of our kids.

We're also going to have additional virtual training for any new teachers that are hired.

So the goal is everyone will have access to high quality instructional resources to support literacy.

I felt like I was tiptoeing when I came in, but today I kind of feel like I put the whole beat in the water and we're ready to go for day one.