Terrebonne and Lafourche public schools adopt new math, social studies curriculums

Students from Terrebonne and Lafourche will have some changes to their school curriculums going into next school year.

The Terrebonne Parish School district is replacing its math curriculum in August for kindergarten through eighth grade, and both Terrebonne and Lafourche are adopting a new social studies program for K through 8. Lafourche Parish is not changing its math curriculum. Both parishes have met state standards for social studies but have adopted the new curriculum. Neither had one in place previously.

According to Terrebonne Parish Superintendent Bubba Orgeron, the school district is changing the program so that parents can understand the material and help their kids at home.

"We are completely changing the curriculum that we use for math," Orgeron said. "Eureka has been controversial. It's overly conceptualized math. Parents were disillusioned with our math curriculum because they just couldn't help kids. It was too complicated for them."

The current math program used by Terrebonne Parish is Eureka Math. It was adopted in 2014. Math comprehension is gauged by how students perform on the LEAP test, and scores rose with the program to new highs, going from a score of 91 to a score of 98. Between 2017 and 2018, a new method of ranking school district scores was brought in. This new ranking system set Terrebonne's to 83, and the district has hovered around that score from 2018 to 2023.

While many school districts struggled to regain ground after the COVID pandemic, Terrebonne students weathered the pandemic, and Hurricane Ida, and their scores remained virtually unchanged.

"With Eureka, we have seen that the math scores have not improved drastically, but they also haven't declined," Terrebonne Parish Chief Academic Officer Sandra LaRose said. "We are just kind of stagnant with those scores, and it is our goal to see growth with children yearly, and we are not seeing that."

The Eureka curriculum, LaRose explained, has pros and cons. The benefits are that students who learn from the curriculum throughout their student life thoroughly understand math, she said. The course builds on itself, but that's also its downside. If a student transfers to Terrebonne Parish from another area, or misses a year for any reason, making up that ground is not easy.

"If they missed the foundation, it is difficult for them to build on that and understand it," LaRose said.

According to LaRose, Eureka is a good curriculum, but feedback from the district's parent committee told them the program was making it difficult for parents to help their kids.

"Many parents are having trouble helping their children at home because this isn't the way that they learned to do math," she said. "It doesn't at all mean that it's bad. It means that they can't support the children when the children don't understand the practice that they are trying to do at home."

The new curriculum, i-Ready, offers sample curriculums here: https://www.curriculumassociates.com/programs/i-ready-learning/classroom-math/sample-lessons-2024-natl. The page starts with word problems, then offers multiple ways to solve the problem. These include pictures and mathematical models.

Bayou Bridges

Lafourche Parish Superintendent Jarrod Martin said the school adopted this social studies curriculum to provide the teachers with a packet of resources to aid in teaching. The Louisiana State Department of Education always has had standards that Terrebonne and Lafourche met, but teachers had to find the educational resources on their own. With this curriculum, many of the resources are provided for them

The Bayou Bridges curriculum is for K-8 and focuses mainly on America, but touches on other world and local histories, depending on the grade. First grade begins with Louisiana and moves to explaining how the government functions. Fourth grade, by comparison, begins with early mankind migrating out of Africa, taming nature and establishing civilizations and ends with a study on the early Mayan cultures.

Curriculum can be downloaded and viewed here: https://www.coreknowledge.org/download-free-curriculum/.

Use the drop down tab to select Bayou Bridges, and click the magnifying glass. From there, choose a grade level and your computer will download a zip file. Extract the contents into a folder and you will find PDF files of the curriculum.

Each page consists of the main text and small side bubbles that explain vocabulary terms to the student. Occasionally, there are photos to illustrate the subject matter, side bars that further explain referenced material, and at the beginning of every chapter there is a framing question.

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According to the teacher's guide, these framing questions are meant to focus the students on the lesson of the chapter. At the end of the lesson, the teachers are to ask the framing question to check for understanding.

"It's a pretty cool curriculum," Martin said. "I think the state department has done a really good job with it, so we are excited about it. In the text as you are reading it, it looks like a textbook, but the text book references and has pieces of all of these documents and so you can - rather than just reading a narrative about what happened - it had embedded in it all of these other various documents, which is how kids are now tested."

This article originally appeared on The Courier: Terrebonne and Lafourche adopt new math, social studies curriculums