Cross Creek Leading the Way in Literacy Through Best Practices, Focused Resources

Reading is the root of all learning, and two National Heritage Academies (NHA^®) schools have been recognized for their prolific ability to improve reading proficiency rates.

Students at Cross Creek Charter Academy and Vanderbilt Charter Academy celebrated March is Reading Month by being among the six West Michigan schools selected as winners of TalentFirst’s 2025 Literacy Leader Awards. This recognition celebrates each school’s commitment to implementing research-based literacy practices and achieving higher reading proficiency scores and growth on the third-grade M-STEP assessment, outperforming peers with similar economic status.


Cross Creek and Vanderbilt have used training supported by NHA, deployed extra funding to hire and strategically place paraprofessionals in areas of need, and used data through progress monitoring systems to intervene on behalf of students who need specialized or individual instruction.

“The teachers, they care so much about literacy. We’re always looking at it, we’re always changing it,” said Melissa Langeland, an instructional coach at Vanderbilt. “We provide one-on-one interventions when we need it, we provide small group interventions. Interventions are woven throughout the classroom at all times. Reading is just a part of what we do.”


Each Literacy Leader Award school received a check for $1,000. TalentFirst developed the Literacy Leader Awards program following its publication in 2023 of a dashboard tracking third grade reading scores on the M-STEP, cross-referenced to economic status, for nearly every elementary school in the state. In 2024, more than 60% of Michigan third graders were unable to read at grade level.

Cross Creek holds monthly meetings with its intervention team to train them on best practices to help students close that literacy gap. In the past few years, the school also has used a new phonics curriculum to help students become more successful in literacy development.
 
Kristin Scherkenbach, an academic specialist at Cross Creek, works directly with teachers to support them in their literacy instructions. She remembers one second grader who could not recognize his name and had difficulty with sounding out letters, placing them far behind even a first-grade benchmark. With the school’s staff focusing on that student’s unique needs, they have thrived, along with many others have made incredible progress.

“We did really intensive invention with them, starting with a lot of one-on-one support and then that was pulled back as progress was made,” she said. “By the time they were in fourth and fifth grade, they no longer received any intervention and were reading at grade level.”


Year-over-year monitoring of students’ progress has helped Vanderbilt hit the ground running at the beginning of the school year instead of making adjustments based on fall assessments. Having a longstanding staff contributes to a long-term investment in students’ success affirms that Vanderbilt and other NHA schools are putting students on the right track.

“We know where they’re at, we’re intervening right from the start,” Langeland said. “It’s a solid systematic program with a lot of caring adults.”
 
About Cross Creek Charter Academy
Cross Creek Charter Academy is a tuition-free, public charter school in Byron Center, Michigan, serving students in Young 5s through eighth grade. It is part of the National Heritage Academies (NHA^®) network, which includes more than 100 tuition-free, public charter schools serving more than 65,000 students in kindergarten through 12th grade across nine states. For more information, visit nhaschools.com.

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