The mission of Liberty Common School’s Academic Support Team (AST) is to ensure every student has access to the rich and rigorous curriculum which makes the school one of Colorado’s premier public primary-education institutions.

LCS prioritizes early targeted intervention.  Early intervention prevents widening gaps in literacy and numeracy skills, results in students returning quickly to the general-education setting, and aids the school in accurately identifying students with disabilities to ensure a free appropriate public education.  Intervention provided by AST professional educators is targeted and intense, the goal is to graduate students from the intervention setting.  LCS rejects the practice of labeling, ability-grouping, and removing students from the general-education setting based on disabilities and/or exceptionalities.

The school employs an in-house professional special educator to lead the Academic Support team, rather than relying upon the special educators of its authorizer, Poudre School District. AST educators at LCS are committed to the mission and philosophy of the school. Each of the six full-time AST faculty members (more than typically employed by a school of 600 students) are content experts.

Referrals—The AST-referral process is the result of continual evaluation and refinement of intervention strategies over many years. Teachers execute the plurality of referrals after considering classroom performance, NWEA assessment data, and professional anecdotal-observations.

The school also employs digital diagnostic-tools.  Star Reading and Aimsweb Plus are regularly-administered diagnostic and monitoring tools for K-3 literacy and numeracy. 

Some students are placed on a watchful-eye list before being referred to AST. Watchful-eye students do not conclusively meet criteria for immediate AST intervention, but their data place them in a range where closer monitoring is appropriate and teacher-directed intervention is prioritized. The additional and more-focused monitoring and intervention allows for eventual referrals to be prompt, precluding to the greatest possible extent an extended absence from the general-education classroom. Students retain their watchful-eye status upon promotion.

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The bulk of K–3 AST work focuses on literacy, consistent with the school’s accentuation of literacy’s applicability wisdom and academic success. The primary literacy intervention-tools are based upon the Science of Reading philosophy as expounded upon in Voyager Sopris’  LETRS program. The AST professionals at LCS expertly administer the program to struggling scholars, helping them achieve grade-level competency as expeditiously as possible.

For 4th–6th-grade students, AST focuses on supporting and reinforcing an increasingly difficult curriculum. This is especially true for math, as difficulty and complexity increase more rapidly during these years. It is also more common for 4th-6th-grade students to struggle with creative and perspective-writing. AST assists with teaching composition-knowledge, and skill-instruction such as creating outlines using the dictionary.

Extended Learning Opportunities—A defining and unique quality of AST at LCS is Extended Learning Opportunities (ELO). Every K-6th-grade classroom dedicates one half hour per day to ELO, during which no core content is taught. Students excelling in all academic subjects use ELO time for learning enrichment, engaging with a current curricular unit of particular interest, or reading from the Great Books List.

Intermediate students use this time receiving additional help from teachers with classwork or the prior-night’s homework. Students struggling with achieving mastery in a particular unit are afforded additional instruction or skills practice.

Students in need of targeted intervention spend ELO time with their AST instructors. This efficacious thirty minutes of focused academic support is a critical ingredient for a successful, and gratifying AST experience for students and their instructors.