Hill Reading Achievement Program (HillRAP)

The Hill Reading Achievement Program (HillRAP) is an initiative of The Hill Center, conducted in collaboration with the North Carolina GlaxoSmithKline Foundation and Durham Public Schools. HillRAP is a public school program in which struggling readers are pulled out of their regular classrooms daily for short periods of time to receive specialized instruction.

HillRAP uses The Hill Center Methodology with minor adaptations to meet the needs of students and teachers in a public school setting. The curriculum has been modified so that it can be implemented in a class period ranging from 45 minutes to 1 hour. There are no more than four students in each HillRAP class. The Hill Reading Achievement Program takes The Hill Center reading curriculum and segments it in to five levels ranging from pre-reading skills to decoding and spelling multi-syllable words. Each level has the following components: Oral Drill, Phonological Awareness, Word Attack, Fluency, Oral/Silent Reading, Comprehension, and Oral/Written Spelling. Each level of the Hill Reading Achievement Program includes carefully selected material that are used for instruction. Students use workbooks that target the specific phonetic patterns taught at each level and use controlled readers and EOG materials to supplement instruction in reading and comprehension.

Davie County
Hill Early Literacy Program (HELP)

The Hill Center is proud to partner with the Mebane Charitable Foundation to implement the Hill Early Literacy Program (HELP), a comprehensive early literacy program for Davie County, North Carolina.   

Research shows that children who enter school with certain requisite “pre-reading” abilities will have a stronger foundation when it comes to learning to read and are much more likely to be successful.  During the critical preschool years (ages 3-5), children must develop critical phonological awareness skills, letter recognition/alphabetic knowledge, letter/sound relationships (four year olds), print awareness, pre-writing skills, and oral language. These components form the basis for learning to read and are a part of the Davie County Hill Early Literacy Program. 

As part of HELP, a training program for early childhood providers has been developed by Hill Center experts and brings together current research about early learning and Hill Center experience in working with struggling readers. The training includes learning the “Hill Center alphabet chant” and lessons in fostering oral language development, dialogic reading, phonological awareness, print awareness, and alphabetic knowledge. Each participating center has been given books which coordinate with the curriculum. There will be quarterly follow-up visits to each preschool during the year. 

Preschoolers in the community will be carefully transitioned to kindergarten, where they will receive reading instruction based on their skill level.  Davie County K-3 Exceptional Children’s teachers will receive specialized training to implement The Hill Center Reading Achievement Program (RAP) for students who are determined to need additional support.  All K-3 EC teachers will also participate in The Hill Center’s PREP program and attain Level I Certification in Hill Methodology. 

The Oak Hill School Project

The Hill Center in Durham, North Carolina, is pleased to announce that it is the recipient of funds from The Oak Foundation to establish a Hill Center-modeled independent school in Geneva, Switzerland. During implementation across 3 years, the grant will enable The Hill Center to expand its outreach to students in a broader international community and enhance its capacity to support current and future replication sites. The grant will also enable The Hill Center to further develop teacher training resources, a portfolio process for monitoring certification status of teachers, and a database system for administration, diagnostic summaries, and student evaluation. The Oak Hill School is scheduled to open its doors in Fall of 2006.

In the development phase of the replication, Research Triangle Institute (RTI), a non-profit independent research organization dedicated to conducting innovative, multidisciplinary research to improve the human condition, will provide technical support and consultation to the project. RTI will also conduct an independent evaluation of the academic gains made by students who attend the Oak Hill School in Geneva.