January 24, 2025
To: Alpha Plus Partner Schools:
Now that we have the fall semester behind us, as well as the first full year of our new ownership and management team, we thought this would be a good time for an Alpha Plus update. We are excited about upcoming additions and improvements underway that we are implementing for the 2025-26 school year, as well as the news below.
Approval to Use Textbook Funds. On December 19, 2024, the State Board of Education approved on their consent docket the request from Morrison Public Schools for a waiver to use textbook funds to purchase Alpha Plus as a supplementary curriculum for their elementary and middle schools. Their request cited the Alpha Plus curriculum as helping Morrison students reach a high level of mastery in Reading, ELA and Math standards, and show tremendous growth. We were excited to see Morrison designated as a National Blue Ribbon School.
New Assessments. We have just added a second bank of formative assessment questions to the Alpha Plus Online Platform for all grades in Math, and for Grades 3-8 in ELA, all of which are included in the assessment packages you have already purchased. We also have made available for the first time a bank of formative SCIENCE assessments for both the 5th and 8th grades, which became available for purchase on the platform at the beginning of the year.
New Teacher/Emergency Certified Training. We held our first hands-on interactive training workshop for new and emergency certified teachers on January 6, 2025, in cooperation with Oklahoma Baptist University in Shawnee. The program, focused on classroom management and other topics suggested by superintendents, was conducted by our new Vice President of Academic Achievement, Dr. Cindy Watson, formerly Program Manager for TLE for the OSDE. Based on the enthusiastic response to that workshop, we have scheduled a second program for February 5, 2025, at the Red River Technology Center in Duncan. We plan to provide additional workshops, each limited to a small group to promote interactivity, over the next year in each of the four quadrants of the state.
For 2025-26, we are proud to announce the addition of:
- Integration with Clever SecureSync and OneRoster. OneRoster will be incorporated into Alpha Plus Online for all schools. Schools wishing to use Clever SecureSync can add it as an option for the small fee charged by Clever. Chris Staton, our Vice President of Data & Technology, can provide more information if you wish, but these powerful data management automation tools will greatly simplify onboarding students into our system and will make student licenses on our platform transportable within a school district.
- Curriculum Rewrite and Upgrade We are rewriting and enhancing virtually all our textbooks and teacher guides, in part to strengthen the curriculum, but also to enlarge and enrich our teacher guides, making them more accessible to newer teachers. Teachers will find our updated ELA textbooks fresher and more engaging for today’s students, with an increased emphasis on writing. We were not happy with our legacy Math textbooks, and engaged a team of math specialists to overhaul, rewrite and enlarge each of them, incorporating the excellent feedback we received from teachers at Alpha Plus partner schools. We believe teachers will really like our new Math curriculum and find it to be a substantial improvement over our previous offerings.
- NEW 1st Grade ELA – We will offer a two volume OAS aligned curriculum with a Reading book along with a Phonics book. Like our two-volume 2nd grade ELA set, it includes three (3) Teacher Guides: Reading, Phonics and Phonological Awareness. 1st grade assessments are already available on the platform. The following year we intend to add a similar Kindergarten curriculum.
- NEW Phonics Plus – We are adding a unique OAS aligned student phonics textbook with a teacher guide providing instruction for those students in grades 3 – 5 needing remediation or additional support. Phonics Plus will be a standalone that a district would purchase only for those students needing this extra support.
- Formative and Summative Science Assessments for grades 6 and 7. These assessments are being written to meet not only current, but the new proposed OAS Science Standards. Assessments for grades 5 and 8 will also be updated to the new proposed OAS Science Standards.
- Enhanced Professional Development. A key feature of Alpha Plus is our on-site professional development sessions and online resources focused on helping teachers use the Alpha Plus curriculum and data driven Online Platform to optimize student outcomes. We now will also be offering professional development training on using our robust ELA 1 & 2 reading, phonics and phonemic awareness offerings to achieve best results in those important early years.
Alpha Plus has a booth and will be a sponsor at both the OASSP/OMLEA Leadership & Learning Conference on February 13- 14; the OAESP Leadership Conference on February 26-27; and the CCOSA Summer Conference on June 11-12. We will also be hosting an open house on the evening of June 11. We hope you will come by – we would love to see you and show you more that Alpha Plus is doing, and to answer any questions that you might have.
W e are very excited by the changes and added offerings at the new Alpha Plus and we hope you are as well. We look forward to helping you achieve success this year, and hopefully next year as well. For more information, please contact Bennie Newton at