Innovative reading clinic opens at Bessemer Elementary
By Peter Strescino

September 16, 1999


School District 60 officials Wednesday hailed a new era in education when they opened the Lindamood-Bell Reading Clinic at Bessemer Elementary.

Thirty-nine district fourth-graders opened the new clinic, located in a renovated annex behind the South Side school. The students were from Fountain, Belmont and Park View elementaries, and all performed poorly in the most recent Colorado Student Assessment Program tests.

The Colorado Literacy Act, a state law that kicked in this spring, mandates that all third-graders who don't read proficiently receive remedial help if they are to pass to fourth-grade reading. The law does not specify exactly what that help must be, but the District 60 school board sank $164,000 into the clinic and assigned several teachers to work there.

In all, almost 475 fourth-graders will be taught LmB reading methods in the clinic this year, said Joyce Bales, district interim superintendent. The program, which was part of a successful turnaround at Bessemer during the past two years, now is used in five district elementaries, two middle schools and is slated to be used at the Youth and Family Academy alternative charter school. Also, some elements are used at the Pueblo School for Arts and Sciences.

The clinic is the largest of its kind provided by LmB, said Greg Logan, who is the company's on-site clinic director. Flo Lenhart is running the clinic from the district's end.

Wednesday, after the children got off the buses that transported them from their home schools, they were placed in groups of four, five or six to begin working with their new teachers.

The kids were placed with other students who are reading at a similar level, Logan said.

LmB clinicians -- there are a dozen currently working in the clinic and in other district schools -- tested the kids at their schools before grouping them for clinic purposes.

Autumn Crary, an LmB employee, worked with five kids Wednesday, teaching them the sounds of words, part of the LmB theory. The kids were tapping their teeth with their tongues and associating words with the sounds they made.

Crary handed out mirrors to her students, who used them to watch the way their lips and teeth formed the words they practiced.

"Do you feel your tongue scrape the roof of your mouth?" she asked her charges. The students formed the words and told her they did.

In another room, students described a picture to Elaine Madrid, a Bradford Elementary School teacher who has transferred to the clinic.

In all, six District 60 teachers have been reassigned to work in the clinic.

All the students in the clinic, no matter what their reading level, will begin with the basic LmB course, Logan said.

He described the program -- which began in the 1960s with the work of Pat and Phyllis Lindamood and Nancy Bell -- as a three-tiered method.

He said instructors teach students how to feel sounds as a means to improve their ability to "auditorally" discriminate between sounds and improve decoding and spelling; symbol imagery, used to stimulate a student's ability to visualize words and letters to improve their spelling and reading rate; and visualization and verbalization to improve a student's ability to create images for the main idea of written and oral language.

Sights, sounds and the feel of words, say program advocates, help even the child who can find reading almost impossible.

The children who opened the clinic Wednesday will spend 33 school mornings working in small groups there. Afternoon sessions for this segment of the operation will be attended by 39 students from Park View. After that, students from the elementaries that do not use the system and who scored poorly on the CSAPs will be bused in to the clinic to work with the teachers. About 120 of those students scored unsatisfactory on the state-mandated tests, and another 352 scored partially proficient, said Bales.

Next year, the district will take over the entire operation of the clinic. Bales said that children from outside of District 60 may be allowed to participate, if there is room.

"The whole idea is to help the kids," she said.

Logan said the children the LmB staff has tested cross a broad spectrum of abilities, from slow learners to kids with average and better intelligence who are termed "non-readers."

"The bulk of these kids are a grade level or two behind in their reading," he said. "Another thing we noticed is they score very low on vocabulary. That is a major concern, because you can learn to decode words on a page, but if you do not know what they mean, how can you learn from the reading?"

Logan said that Saturday sessions are being set up to get the parents of the children to learn some of the system, so they can understand what their kids are talking about when they describe the clinic's work.

Lenhart, who along with Bessemer Principal Gary Trujillo worked all summer without pay to ready the building and schedule for the clinic, said she was elated to be a part of the organization.

"This is so exciting, to be able to help these children who have had a tough three years learning to read," she said. "We are intervening to help them succeed and get the most of their ability. If we can teach these kids to read, they will be able to grasp the other subjects necessary for their education.

"This clinic is the beginning of a new era in District 60."