By SHARON KILPATRICK

By SHARON KILPATRICK

Rappahannock News Staff Writer

The Rappahannock School Board accepted the administration’s recommendation for high-school science textbooks at its regular monthly meeting last Tuesday but balked at accepting the textbook selection committee’s recommendation for elementary reading texts.

The committee had recommended that the Harcourt-Brace Jovanovich series be adopted but supplemented by a phonics program, which the committee has not yet selected. Stonewall-Hawthorn District representative William Oliver moved that the reading adoption be tabled until the Board could see the phonics materials. “I’m a strong phonics booster,” he said.

School Board Chairman Beverly Massie agreed, saying she had been taught by the “look see” method and as a result, “I’m a very poor speller. It’s important that phonics be stressed in school.”

Piedmont District representative Dorothy Butler agreed, noting that as a retired teacher she had taught both methods and preferred phonics.

The state is requiring phonics instruction, but School Superintendant David Gangel said only one of the textbook series from the state's list has a phonics program, and that, in his opinion, isn’t a very good one.

“The state isn’t following its own guidelines,” he said. “The buzzword now is ‘whole language.’ That means that good literature should not be corrupted by alteration to fit the reading level. That’s baloney. The literature drives what kind of phonics you can have. In my opinion they have to learn to decode. If you start with ‘decoding comes first,’ then phonics will drive the literature.

“Children come to school with a 5,000 to 6,000 word vocabulary. In the first three years you try to build up decoding skills to be on par with their vocabulary . . . In third or fourth grade you switch gears and start reading for content. The ‘whole language’ people don’t recognize the difference.”