Kingfisher Public Schools was presented the 2022 Reading Champions award by The Reading League Oklahoma in August.

The honor was to recognize the work - and results - achieved by the district with new reading curriculum and programs that have been instituted.

The school district’s “reading team” talked with Kingfisher Lions Club members on Thursday about the work that has been done.

Those on hand were Sheila Redwine, Micah Mueggenborg, Lacey Kuehn, Lesley Redwine, Kayla Voth and Teri Hopkins.

Sheila Redwine is the district’s reading specialist and she provided an overview of the work that began in 2020, which included assessing needs and the programs that would benefi t students at the younger levels.

Mueggenborg is a reading specialist at Gilmour, Hopkins runs the school’s Motor Lab, Lesley Redwine is the library media specialist at Gimour and Heritage, Kuehn and Voth are Take Flight program instructors.

The latter two have gone through at least two years of training for their positions. Each teacher discussed with Lions the effort they put in and out of the classroom to work with students at all reading levels.

Numbers have backed up the efforts of the group of teachers.

Students are screened each August, January and April to identify the number that read below the benchmark for their grade.

At the beginning of the 2021-22 school year, Gilmour Elementary had 16% of students in kindergarten, first and second grades reading below the benchmark.

By the middle of the year, the number was down to 5% and by the end of the year it was just 4%.

Sheila Redwine said introducing new curriculum in a school is not easy and they introduced four of them.

“We were asking a lot of our teachers,” she said. “Our classroom teachers are the real rock stars.”

She went on to say the advances in reading have been a true group effort, not by just those at the school, but the community as a whole. Funding for some of the programs have been aided by the Kingfisher Educational Foundation and the Go For Public School program.