By Nicholas Brown
Staff Writer

WEARE – As students filed out of Center Woods Elementary School in Weare after their first day back in the classroom, one new teacher voiced contentment over life’s most basic pleasure.

“I survived,” Sara Rafuse, the school’s new kindergarten inclusion facilitator, said of her first day on the job. “I’d say it went pretty well.”

With day one on the books, Rafuse now looks forward to the rest of the year, where she’ll be a brand-new teacher heading a brand-new literacy program aimed to improve literacy of the school’s brand new students.

For the past three years, Weare Center Woods Elementary School educators have been following through on an initiative to boost the reading skills of their students, who span kindergarten through fourth grade.

Rafuse, who is finishing one more class at New England College in Henniker en route to a master’s degree in special education and elementary education with an emphasis in literacy, is taking the helm of the school’s latest effort to foster literacy.

One of her primary responsibilities will be the new kindergarten program, Intersession, aimed at giving kindergarten students who may be struggling with the beginnings of literacy an opportunity to boost their skills.

Intersession will be available during the hour intermission between the morning and afternoon kindergarten sessions. Once teachers identify a student who may be in need of additional help, the student’s parents will be notified for approval of the added instructional time.

The goal, said Rafuse, is to identify why each individual student may be struggling, work to overcome the setback and, ultimately, release the student from the program – a mark of success.

“If we can get those letter skills and phonics sounds down now, we hopefully won’t have a problem with teachers in third grade saying, ‘This student or that student is behind,’” said Rafuse, who also holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology from New England College.

Of graduating students from the program, Rafuse said, “We’ll work with the kids until they don’t need it anymore, or if their parents think it’s no longer necessary.”

Rafuse admitted that an extra hour may be a lot to ask of young students, and that a goal of the program would be to keep students excited and interested, sometimes through games.

Center Woods Principal Jude Chauvette said the program was inspired in part by the research of Jack Fletcher, Ph.D., of the University of Texas at Houston, who presented some of his findings to teachers last year.

Chauvette said kindergarten students mainly deal with two of five aspects of reading. Those are phonetic awareness – the ability to discern that words are made of sounds and vice versa – and phonics – the ability to associate sounds with letters.

The other aspects of reading – vocabulary, comprehension and fluency – come later, but, Chauvette said, “phonetic awareness and phonics are critical in kindergarten and first grade. We want to try and reach these ages as soon as possible.”

Chauvette said the program will offer more intimate instruction that could ideally “wake up” parts of the brain that may not have been stimulated in the classroom setting.

But, he stressed, “This is not intended to be a long-term intervention. Once a student gathers the skills they need, they can move on completely.”

Aside from getting kindergartners up to grade level expectations as they enter first grade, Chauvette said he hopes the program will help determine which students have learning difficulties that exceed the scope of Intersession.

“There are going to be some kids who have truly special needs,” he said.

But other students – those, for example, who have rarely been exposed to elements of literacy at home – stand to gain from the program.

“Some kids can come to school, and they never have been read to,” he said. “Intersession can help them to realize some of the skills they need.”

Rafuse, who may have careers on her mind as she now begins her own, said, “When they’re in kindergarten, we’re setting them up for the rest of their school career.”