Though it originally fought against the state mandate to change its elementary English Language Arts (ELA) curriculum, officials with Wilton Public Schools continue striving to paint a positive picture of how implementation is progressing.
Karen Brenneke, the district’s K-8 curriculum coordinator, updated the Board of Education on Thursday night, Apr. 17, on use of the EL Education program.
“For the 2025-2026 school year, we are recommending that we be in full implementation of EL Education in kindergarten through 5th grade,” she said. “This accelerates the partial implementation plan for kindergarten that was recommended by the K-3 committee last year and it brings us into full compliance with the law for kindergarten through 3rd grade in the upcoming school year.”
School officials will need to address several issues, however, including news that the current materials supplier, Imagine Learning, is being phased out, as well as unhappiness expressed by some Middlebrook School teachers who are not in favor of EL Education at that school.
“Here’s where it gets a little bit dicey,” Brenneke told the BOE. “Our current materials provider is Imagine Learning. Some people mistakenly call the curriculum ‘Imagine Learning.’ The curriculum is EL Education. The materials provider is Imagine Learning.”
“EL Education is a nonprofit organization that partners with multiple materials providers,” she said. “In this 2024-2025 revision cycle, they have offered exclusive access to Kiddom and to Open Up Resources.”
“The curriculum stays the same (but) the materials provider, it’s a slightly different presentation,” Brenneke said, noting she would work with both Miller-Driscoll and Cider Mill Schools to decide which material provider will be the “most accessible for the teachers to ease their implementation.”
With implementation for grades 3, 4 and 5, Brenneke said, “There’s a lot to learn. We are shifting philosophies from balanced literacy to structured literacy, and there’s the added layer of learning how to access different structural materials.”
Consequently, since teachers at Cider Mill have already begun training with the soon-to-be unavailable Imagine Learning materials, Brenneke said they will continue to use them for the next three years.
“We don’t want to disrupt their learning by kind of shifting everything all around all at once,” she said. “Everything all at once has been really hard for the last four years, so we’re gonna kind of pump the breaks on that.”
Meanwhile, Brenneke said that Wilton’s second grade is having a “rough time” with the implementation, so they will be given a choice of exactly when they want to implement the new materials.
While there were two other options along with EL Education that were explored for Middlebrook, in conjunction with the 4-12 curriculum committee, Brenneke said consensus could not be reached.
“The holdouts were the [Middlebrook] middle school teachers, so we’re gonna have to enact … our fallback decision-making process,” she said, meaning that she would make the call.
“I imagine that on June 4, when the committee reconvenes, we will have a bit more debate about why coherence in K-8 is best for students, and then we will move forward recommending EL Education,” Brenneke said.
“There was some concern from some committee members that because the middle school teachers weren’t excited about EL Education, that it might not be the right way to go, but I remained unconvinced that decisions about liking books and for adult comfort, they were just pushing up too hard about what was best for students, so we’re going to move forward and explore that a little bit more,” she said.
“I just can’t find any evidence to support that not having a coherent K-8 program is the way to go,” Brenneke said.
“I am looking for a kindergarten through eighth grade coherent program,” she said. “That’s what we’re replacing. We had a kindergarten through eighth grade coherent program with T.C. [Teachers College at Columbia University] and I’m looking to continue to build that knowledge through eighth grade.”
Brenneke said the 4-12 committee gave approval to four items that Wilton High School indicated it would move forward with, including studying the K-8 curriculum, work to align assessments between courses in grades 9 and 10, and work on a feasibility study to offer a “humanities model” to all freshmen.
BOE members praised Brenneke and the work of the committees.
“I would like to just take a minute to call out Karen for the tremendous work,” BOE Chair Ruth DeLuca said.
“We need to insure that those transitions and that coherence across the grades is solid,” she said, “and then that gives, I think, our teachers the space and the ability to really make the classroom work as rigorous as possible and then to make the programs as accessible as possible to all our kids.”
“Change is hard,” she said.
BOE member Pam Ely echoed the praise.
“It’s been very impressive for me to be on that committee and watch them try to put something together that works,” she said.