As part of a year-long initiative to improve literacy levels at APHS, students and staff are working hard to incorporate reading and writing across the curriculum. Mrs. Mendez (APHS English teacher) and other ASPIRA faculty attended a week-long literacy training in San Francisco last June, as part of introducing the new school-wide Reading Apprenticeship Academic Literacy curriculum (RAAL). APHS students are in the process of discovering their "reader identity" by completing a reading survey, previewing and selecting SSR (sustained silent reading) books and completing meta-cognitive logs, where students are asked to write about their reading processes and to identify reading roadblocks. Students increase their "reading stamina" by participating in SSR at least two times per week.  

The goal is to continue to build stamina, build on the reading strategies repertoire and continually question who we are as readers and writers. As a school, we plan to incorporate the RAAL strategies across the curriculum to significantly raise the percentage of high school graduates that are highly proficient readers and writers and that meet or exceed Illinois Learning Standards across subject areas, as measured by the high stakes PSAE/ACT exams.