Literacy Consultant

Rosemary Burks has been a Literacy Consultant with the Arkansas State Improvement/Personnel Development Grant (SIG/SPDG) since 2003. Her primary focus in this role has been to assist both special and general educators in creating an integrated consultation and intervention cadre for their schools to benefit all struggling learners with an emphasis on students with disabilities. She has provided professional development to general and special education teachers which focused on data-based decision making and strategic research-based literacy interventions. She has also worked closely with teachers and administrators to establish flexible scheduling and co-teaching settings at the building level.

Mrs. Burks’ primary role as a SPDG Literacy Consultant focuses on improving the educational needs of all students, especially those with disabilities, and specifically providing support through professional development, consultation, and technical assistance in the areas of school improvement and effective organizational planning, literacy instruction and intervention, multi-tiered Response-to-Intervention (RtI) and data-based problem solving.

During her thirty years experience working with elementary and secondary students with disabilities, Mrs. Burks taught in a wide variety of settings ranging from resource, self-contained, and speech/language classrooms to co-teaching environments. In 1984, she co-authored Pick a Peck of Lessons, a book designed for implementation in speech therapy programs.

Mrs. Burks received her Bachelor’s Degree in Speech Pathology and her Master’s Degree in Special Education from the University of Central Arkansas. She has received training in numerous Arkansas literacy initiatives including ELLA, Effective Literacy, Smart Step/Next Step, Reading First, and Literacy Lab. She also attended the 2006 DIBELS Mentor Training Institute which focused on the in-depth administration of the DIBELS assessments. She worked extensively on the Arkansas Literacy Matrix and the RIDE Reading Intervention Bank projects. Mrs. Burks will complete her certification requirements in 2011 through the University of Kansas Center for Research on Learning to become a SIM (Strategic Instruction Model) Professional Developer for Content Enhancement Routines. She is a member of the Council of Exceptional Children, the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, and the International and Arkansas Reading Associations.