‘Awesome’ results from phonics use

Just thinking about her son not having access to the Saxon Phonics program in school makes Amy Vittori anxious. Her voice starts to shake, and her words speed up, spilling over one another.

“He’s reading Harry Potter and he’s only in first grade,” Vittori said. “It’s an awesome program.”

But next school year, her son will be sent from Ellicott City’s Ilchester Elementary, which offers Saxon, to Columbia’s Waterloo Elementary, which doesn’t, because of boundary changes.

“I will pull my kid out of school if Saxon doesn’t come” to Waterloo, Vittori promised.

Every year, more Howard County schools adopt the program, which they must pay for themselves and typically costs about $5,000. Most schools use the program in kindergarten through second or third grade.

Centennial Lane and West Friendship elementaries added it this year, raising the number of elementary schools using it to about 15 out of 37.

“I sent some of my teachers toward the end of last year over to Ilchester to investigate it,” said West Friendship Principal Corita Oduyoye. “They came back ranting and raving about how wonderful it was and what they saw the children doing.”

Oduyoye shelled out $5,300, had the company that publishes Saxon – which is based in Oklahoma – send trainers and crossed her fingers hoping she soon would see her school’s reading and writing scores improve as they have at Gorman Crossing Elementary (in its second year of using Saxon) and Ilchester.

“We have seen a lot of success – very measurable success – from it,” said Holly Smith, Ilchester assistant principal, who learned about the program from a West Virginia teacher. Smith checked out Saxon, loved it and introduced it to Howard four years ago.

Howard uses Saxon more than does any county in Maryland, but schools in other counties – including Allegany, Baltimore, Frederick, St. Mary’s and Wicomico – use it as well, with private schools throughout the state.

Phonics teaches children to read through “decoding” words – giving them the means to understand individual- and combination-letter sounds – and Saxon’s version is rigorous, with intensive repetition and a foolproof script making it easier for teachers to use.

“Ours is no-nonsense content. It’s very black and white,” said Frank Y.H. Wang, one of the founders of Saxon Publishing, which began as a math system in the early 1980s and added the phonics program in late 1996.

“We teach in increments,” Wang said, “and believe in constant practice and review and continual cumulative testing.”

But critics worry that the program’s literature component is scant, that advanced readers will get bored with it and that implementing it at schools on a case-by-case basis makes for uneven quality of education across the county.

Debi Howell, a kindergarten teacher at Centennial Lane Elementary, acknowledges she’s a little leery of Saxon.

For one, she says, it has a whole-group approach, and Howard County schools recommend addressing pupil needs individually or in small groups. Another aspect that concerns her is the lack of flexibility.

“This is a script that I just basically read,” Howell said. “I find with this kind of instruction, it’s not truly a student-teacher reaction.”

The school system offers schools an “essential curriculum” – a list of objectives and skills that must be taught to and mastered by students in each grade. But it doesn’t tell teachers how to meet those goals, which leaves open the possibility for many different programs at different schools.

Centennial Lane Principal Robert Bruce said schools appreciate that flexibility because they know their pupils’ learning needs best. He brought Saxon to Centennial Lane at the urging of one of his first-grade teachers, Lori Ettienne.

Ettienne had previous experience with Saxon when she taught at Waverly Elementary and, unlike Howell, found the program full of creativity and firm results.

Ettienne said her first-graders this year, who’ve been using the program for just one quarter, have already met the county’s requirement for decoding skills for the year and jumped three benchmark reading levels.