EDISON, N.J. – Emil Carafa, the principal of Washington Elementary School in Northern New Jersey started a pilot program with the Michigan-developed WriteSteps elementary school writing curriculum three years ago. He couldn?t be happier with the results today.
Begun in 2007, the latest iteration of WriteSteps complies with the new national Common Core State Standards in an effort to prepare students for national writing tests that will begin with the 2014-2015 school year.
?WriteSteps has increased test scores at our school,? Carafa said. ?Our children also are writing with more comfort and ease.?
Carafa said the parents report to him seeing a change in their children?s writing. Parents are telling him their kids are talking about writing like never before. This year, WriteSteps has been expanded to all five elementary schools in the district, Carafa said.
Certainly, WriteSteps has come a long way since winning the Best of Boot Camp award at Ann Arbor SPARK in November 2010. Founder and Chief Executive Officer Suzanne Klein, who moved operations of her virtual company from her native Ann Arbor to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, a year ago said the company cracked a million dollars in sales for this calendar year in September. She has also expanded to 20 virtual employees.
Other WriteSteps milestones include:
Sales revenue for the 2013-2014 school year as of Sept. 14 is 75 percent higher than the same period last year.
Common Core lessons on a national basis starting with the 2011-2012 school year are now in more than 2,500 classrooms in 47 states, including more than 1,700 Michigan classrooms ? a 7 percent Michigan market penetration in less than two school year cycles. A WriteSteps national market penetration of the same 7 percent would result in gross revenues of $17 million, estimated Chief Financial Officer Mike Klein.
This tremendous Michigan growth was achieved with little marketing or advertising – only Suzanne, a former school teacher herself, making presentations on how to teach writing at schools, as well as exhibiting at education conferences. Sales also grew from word-of-mouth recommendations from satisfied teachers and principals. She said WriteSteps has helped increase Michigan MEAP cohort writing tests scores 30 percentage points.
The current marketing plan calls for WriteSteps to be much more aggressive. The plan includes free trail sample lessons for teachers, full social networking presence, an active blog and newsletter, plus more conference presence and advertising, and hiring commissioned sales representatives.
What makes WriteSteps so popular with educators? Klein said WriteSteps provides detailed minute-by-minute lesson plans with supporting classroom material for a complete school year. There are 500-700 pages in each of the binders (or web-based annual subscriptions) provided to each K-5 teacher. Principals like this detail for tracking teacher progress and teachers welcome the detail since they can concentrate on the job of classroom teaching rather than creating lesson plans on the fly.
After such success in Michigan, why move headquarters to Florida?
?I couldn?t do the Michigan winters anymore,? Suzanne said. ?Since we are a virtual company, we all have the benefit of working from anywhere. I have 20 team members all working smarter not harder from home. Plus, it is great to get different perspectives on education and on their local schools’ structure with my team living in different states.?
Where does she see WriteSteps in five years and what does she hope to accomplish?
?I would like WriteSteps to be the industry leader in supporting and teaching teachers in the area of Common Core writing and grammar,? Klein said. ?We also have a lot of areas to grow into. We are going to take a look at how to create a platform for students to be able to interact more with the visual aids, have assessment pieces built in, and also some learning games incorporated into the program. We also would like to grow our technology offerings by allowing students to use a speech-to-text function to help eliminate some of the obstacles children face when writing. And we will have computers generated scoring of the students’ writing.
?As far as what we hope to accomplish, well that part is easy,? she said. ?To create as many confident writing teachers as possible throughout the world. We?re already in India and Canada. These confident teachers, in turn, would help create successful writers. It?s not a mission we take lightly.?
For more information, click on WriteStepsWriting.Com
