The Carle Place Board of Education approved tenure for Cherry Lane Elementary School principal Lauren Moriarty on Wednesday, April 23 and then listened to her give a presentation on the state of literacy in the district.
Moriarty and District Assistant Superintendent for Business Joanna DeMartino received an explosion of applause from an audience of dozens after the votes on their tenure.
When I’m dealing with Ms. Moriarty, I know that I’m dealing with a person of tremendous intelligence,” Carle Place Superintendent Ted Cannone said. “I know that I’m dealing with a person of great integrity, a spine of steel, great care for her students and enormous care for her teachers.”
“She puts the kids first and really serves the community the way you want to see when you entrust a school full of children to somebody,” he added. “It is an enormous pleasure and a great honor to serve Carle Place together.”
“You are an incredibly dependable person. You are a very wise person. You are as intelligent as they come,” Cannone said to DeMartino, who was recognized second for tenure. “There is an enormous amount of strength in this human being right here. She is the person who knows where the ship is going, helps us steer through rough waters and has the creativity and the foresight to make things happen that a lesser person just couldn’t do.”
He said it was a privilege to nominate Moriarty and DeMartino both for the designation.
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After the tenure celebration, Moriarty, alongside district reading specialists, presented to the board as a member of Carle Place’s Literacy Committee.
The Literary Committee, one of the district’s four subject-specific committees, conducted an in-depth study of Carle Place’s current literary and English Language Arts programs to assess whether it meets state standards and provide recommendations for improvement.
“Literacy is really the foundation of everything in life,” Moriarty said, emphasizing the importance of establishing strong skills in the early grades for students to be successful as they move through their schooling. “In order to be successful, you have to be literate.”
The committee said their assessment showed Carle Place meeting and exceeding state curriculum standards and adhering to evidence-based practices for teaching reading. However, based on assessment and feedback from teachers, students, and parents, they identified weaknesses in the district’s writing curriculum.
The group presented recommendations to strengthen the district’s literacy programs, including increased consistency across all district classrooms in how elementary students are taught reading and phonetics, embedding vocabulary words into lessons organically and continuing to incorporate Google’s Read Live tool into elementary classrooms, which provides teachers with data on students’ phonetic progress and errors, allowing them to form specifically tailored lessons to support students where they need it most.
Moriarty and her fellow committee members emphasized the importance of daily reading for students: A student who reads 1 minute a day will be exposed to 8,000 words a year. But, a student who reads 20 minutes a day? They’ll be exposed to 1,800,000 words a year.
The group emphasized the importance of community involvement in children’s reading development, encouraging parents to push their children to read every night and exploring working with local businesses in the fall to create programs to incentivize reading.
