How Melinda LaMont Transformed Kindergarten Literacy in Cache County, Utah

Melinda LaMont, a former classroom teacher turned district Kindergarten Specialist, is driving a literacy revolution in Cache County School District (CCSD), Utah. With a passion for early education and a data-driven mindset, Melinda has helped reshape how the district supports its youngest learners—using clear goals, progress monitoring, and ESGI!

Breaking Through a Plateau

Historically, Melinda says, CCSD has scored exceptionally well on Acadience and the other standardized testing systems Utah uses to measure student learning. But in recent years, they’ve noticed some neighboring school districts starting to surpass them, hitting well above benchmark while CCSD’s scores remained static. Determined to improve her district’s numbers, Melinda and her team started visiting other school districts to investigate what might be making the difference.

“We wanted to know—what are they doing that we’re not?”

Melinda and her team visited high-performing districts expecting to find different curricula. Instead, they discovered something else: a strong culture of progress monitoring. Educators in these districts had a laser focus on tracking student growth in real time—and many of them credited ESGI as their go-to tool.

Setting Clear, Ambitious Goals  

Inspired by what they saw, Melinda set three bold, district-wide goals for kindergarten literacy:

• All students will know their letters and sounds by November 1.
• Students will be blending CVC words by February 1.
• By year’s end, students will read 10 words fluently—without sounding them out.

She decided on these goals because they focused on foundational literacy skills.

“We knew that we wanted the kids to be able to learn their letters and sounds earlier than what even our curriculum has them paced at, because the sooner they know letters and sounds, the sooner they can write and read.”

Her team also found that these goals aligned seamlessly with family-teacher conferences: they were able to share these benchmarks with families and tell them how close their individual students were to meeting them and where they needed additional support. By doing this, they were able to enlist the families in their efforts to get the kids of CCSD on track.

ESGI: The Game-Changer 

To track progress toward these goals, Melinda needed a reliable, easy-to-use assessment platform. ESGI emerged as the clear choice. 

 Teachers in the other districts they spoke with called out ESGI in particular as absolutely crucial for measuring discrete literacy skills. 

 Melinda’s initiative brought ESGI to every kindergarten classroom in the district. The results? Outstanding. “We’re hitting 90% or more on our goals so far this year, so that’s awesome.” 

With ESGI, CCSD now has real-time data on student performance across the district. Teachers can quickly identify areas where students need support, and district leaders can offer targeted guidance to keep everyone on track. 

Looking Ahead 

As of this coming school year, the state of Utah will no longer be supporting the kindergarten assessment platform they previously mandated. Per Melinda’s direction, ESGI is going to fill that gap. They plan to use it to conduct a single, comprehensive pre-kindergarten assessment. This way, teachers will have baseline data to compare to as students develop their skills throughout the year.  

CCSD kindergarten teachers love ESGI so much, she says, that they’ve been anxious to know if the district will continue to support it. “Teachers usually don’t say how much they love something until they feel like it’s going to be pulled away,” she said. “They’ve been really supportive, asking, ‘are we going to get this back?’ ‘Are we still going to be able to use this?’” Fortunately, Melinda gets to tell them that ESGI is indeed here to stay.