Students at Cloves C. Campbell Senior Elementary School in Arizona’s Roosevelt School District performed reasonably well in 2007, but educators knew that the students could meet even higher expectations with the right support. So in 2008, representatives from Cloves C. Campbell Senior Elementary School visited neighboring Alhambra School District to see Success for All Foundation’s middle school reading program—the Reading Edge—in action. This visit convinced Cloves C. Campbell’s educators that the Reading Edge was right for them. Since implementing the program in 2009, Cloves C. Campbell has seen their test results go from good to great.
 

“As a staff, we wanted to make sure we had an excelling school,” said Janice Palmer, SFAF facilitator at Cloves C. Campbell. “At Alhambra, we liked what we saw.”
 

SFA started as an elementary school program but expanded to include middle school in 2005. After a few years of implementation, these schools have hit their stride and started to get results.
 

Cloves C. Campbell is one of these success stories. In 2010, 75 percent of the school’s students were proficient on the Arizona's Instrument to Measure Standards (AIMS) test. The results are on par with the state average, despite Cloves C. Campbell’s 80 percent free- and reduced-price lunch population, which is 40 percent higher than the state overall.
 

The SFA middle school approach is centered on the Reading Edge, a program that addresses the broad range of reading achievement at the middle school level by accommodating beginning through eighth-grade reading levels. Students at the higher levels develop their comprehension strategies using a variety of narrative and expository texts, while students at the lower levels work on expanding basic foundational skills.
 

In SFA classes, students with varying skill levels are assigned to cooperative-learning groups. The faculty and administration of Cloves C. Campbell used this to their advantage, particularly for the school’s special-education population. According to Karolyn Grafton, the special-education teacher for grades 7 and 8, the Reading Edge helped her struggling students improve quickly:
 

“Breaking the questions down and having the lower-level students discuss it with more advanced students, it improves their confidence,” she said. “I’ll make sure to call on them so they can give an answer.”
 

The professional development offered as part of program implementation has enhanced the ability of Cloves C. Campbell staff to help those students who are struggling with reading. School staff members are particularly impressed with the work of SFAF point coaches, who conduct quarterly walkthroughs, work collaboratively with teachers to set goals, and address existing issues to ensure effective implementation.
 

“With other programs, it’s ‘thanks for buying our books, and you’re on your own,’” said Palmer. “The (SFAF) point coaches, with their walkthroughs, have been incredibly supportive. They are so energetic and positive.”
 

Effective professional development is needed to ensure continuous improvement in an environment such as Cloves C. Campbell, where changes in the elementary-school feeder system over the past year have resulted in 153 new students within the school’s overall population of 195 students. In addition, cuts to the school budget increased the classroom size to nearly thirty students per class this year. According to Grafton, these challenges have made the streamlined teaching strategies of the Reading Edge program even more essential to maintaining student performance:
 

“We’ve adopted point coaches’ advice and have made cooperative-learning instruction our own. We’re taking the structure of an SFA lesson and using it for social studies and science.”
 

“We want to continually improve and, as a staff, make sure we have an excelling school,” said Palmer.