In the wake of tough news about literacy, Farmington Municipal Schools (FMS) has much to celebrate. In addition to a steadily increasing graduation rate since 2010, FMS saw a 10% gain in student state reading scores in both grades 3-5 and grades 6-8 in the last two years alone.
These trends aren’t a lucky streak. In 2020, New Mexico’s Department of Education launched its Structured Literacy New Mexico initiative to boost reading achievement. Since then, FMS has worked diligently to research, understand, and ultimately adopt structured literacy within its own schools. A major part of this undertaking included aligning three critical factors that affect student achievement: curricula, instruction, and assessment.
Level Data recently sat down with Jennifer Bowles, Director of Early Education, and Nicole Lambson, Executive Director of Curriculum and Instruction, to reflect together about planning, implementing, and monitoring FMS’s new structured literacy program. Keep reading to learn how they led their district through major change with tangible results.
Create a shared vision for shared impact
Before even talking about program logistics, Lambson and Bowles pointed out that a change of this magnitude can be particularly challenging in education. Lambson shared, “We had to do our due diligence first, for people to understand the reason and rationale for such a change.”
And that meant involving not only key district leaders like the superintendent and cabinet in the planning process, but also school principals. Principals proved invaluable in sharing their perspective on the literacy program and its implementation plan. More importantly, they lead the practical efforts to bring the vision to life within their buildings.
Taking time upfront to educate these stakeholders about the philosophy and research behind structured literacy continues to pay off. Bowles shared, “[We maintain momentum by] keeping focused on the why, emphasizing [the literacy plan] is rooted in research and best practices … and seeing progress with student achievement … It’s important for us to stay focused. Our students and families deserve it.”
Build continuity across both systems and resources
Bowles and Lambson pointed to the benefits of having both shared literacy resources and systems up, down, and across the district.
Elementary schools within FMS were the first to implement the new literacy plan, including new scales (more on this in a moment), corresponding curricula, and, over time, aligned instructional practices. As elementary teachers embraced the program, Bowles saw student achievement scores improving in parallel.
The success of this change model and the systems around it became the foundation for expanding structured literacy into middle schools. In the 2025-26 school year, FMS launched its first literacy interventions program for sixth-grade students. And already, FMS is seeing improvements in student performance after just a few cycles of interventions.
Lambson shared, “Our sixth graders were first graders during the pandemic … No longer can we blame the pandemic [for skill deficits] … it was a call to action for FMS to have better support structures in middle school … to help students feel confident in reading.”
Standardizing structured literacy intervention and instructional practices between elementary and middle school grade levels proved powerful, especially in creating continuity for new sixth-grade students receiving literacy support.
Other strategies that FMS uses to maintain continuity across the program include:
- A common data structure by which teachers track and measure students’ progress with literacy interventions, allowing services and their impact to easily follow students from grade to grade.
- Monthly principal meetings where school leaders review proficiency data, often in cross-sectional teams (think: an elementary principal meeting with middle school principals).
- School-based PLCs, where principals share insights and best practices gained from their collaboration with other leaders and teachers, support one another with instructional improvement. This has been especially important for middle school teachers, who often don’t receive training related to literacy instructional strategies.
- A cabinet meeting three times a year where principals present their schools’ data and share what is working well, what needs improvement, and how the district can support their schools.
Check alignment by triangulating data (of every kind)
Underpinning FMS’s new literacy scales and subsequent curricular and instructional changes was this hypothesis: If students master a small set of “critical concepts,” or skills, in literacy, they will ultimately perform proficiently on the state reading assessments.
But as the program unfolded, Lambson and Bowles needed to validate that they had indeed chosen the right skills students needed to master. For that, they needed concrete data, not guesstimates. “What gets monitored gets done,” Lambson explained.
This was where Level Data’s Return On Instruction (ROI) platform came into play. ROI correlates student performance, participation, and other key data from anything and everything that influences achievement, from curricula to coaching to district-created assessments like FMS’s new scales.
In particular, the ACE Report in ROI was key to testing the FMS hypothesis. The report, pictured below, correlates the number of critical concepts (proficiency scales) that FMS students mastered in a given school year against their spring state reading scores.
Within these first two years of the literacy plan, FMS discovered an exciting pattern across elementary schools: Students’ mastery of these select critical concepts could predict their proficiency on the state assessment.
In other words, FMS’s hypothesis was proving valid.
This and other reports available in ROI help FMS keep the literacy program on track in other ways, like reviewing potential grade inflation and identifying “bubble students” on the cusp of proficiency. But Lambson didn’t expect ROI data to align expectations as well.
She shared a story of one principal who expressed concerns about the difficulty of a fifth-grade district literacy assessment. To verify this concern, she compared the content from the assessment against a sample state reading test. Not only were both evenly matched in difficulty, but also in content.
“There was a disconnect in understanding what students should be able to do by the end of the year,” said Lambson. “That was a powerful conversation, not only using data but also exemplars to [align] principals and teachers’ expectations.”
Harmonizing curricula, assessments, and instruction that drives literacy
Bowles and Lambson acknowledge that FMS still has work to do to reach its ambitious goal of having at least 85% of students proficient by fifth grade. But these first years of the program give them confidence.
Bowles expressed gratitude for Level Data’s ongoing support: “Data isn’t very useful if you cannot paint a picture with it … It’s nice to have my ways of doing what I do with data, but also to have [Level Data] come in [with their perspective] to reaffirm that … we are headed in the right direction.”
Lambson echoed this sentiment: “Whatever data you have that you need to answer a question can be uploaded, synthesized, and correlated [in ROI] against your question… that is the power of Level Data.”
