Bayless School District’s Writing with Design Initiative Accelerates Growth for Multilingual Learners
From Support from the Refugee School Impact Program, Bayless School District’s newly implemented Writing with Design Program sees improvement in student writing.
Photo Courtesy of Bayless School District
By: Aman Rahman
At the Bayless School District, students arrive with backgrounds that stretch from local St. Louis neighborhoods to countries across Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas. Serving around 1,800 students across the early, elementary and secondary levels, the Bayless mission centers on providing an enriching environment for all students to learn.
Improving student writing has long remained a central goal for the district, Dr. Monika Hasanbasic, the English Language Development Director, notes. This goal is also personal to Dr. Hasanbasic, previously being a refugee. Many of the school’s English Learners arrive with significant gaps in their education. These lapses are often due to long periods in refugee camps, interruptions in schooling during student’s journey to the United States, or, in some cases, no prior schooling.
“We want to give our English Learners the opportunity to catch up on all the learning they have missed,” Dr. Hasanbasic said. “For some students, entering high school without strong literacy skills in their first language, while also being expected to learn English, can be overwhelming and requires meaningful, ongoing support.”
Noticing this need for additional supportive services, Bayless, as a MO-ORA partner, introduced the Writing with Design initiative through the Refugee School Impact program in 2024. This decision was inspired by Dr. Hasanbasic, who first encountered the approach after hearing founder, Amber Parks, present an overview at a conference. The Writing with Design program is a research-based instructional framework that also provides professional development for teachers. Dr. Hasanbasic was struck with its unique ability to provide teachers with strategies that simplify the writing process into clear, manageable steps, aligned with state and national standards, which can be directly integrated into classroom lessons.
Since the Writing with Design program was implemented, Bayless has seen transformative gains in student writing achievements on the district’s nearly 400 multilingual learners, including close to 100 newcomers.
Early learners have progressed from writing letters and single words to complete sentences. Elementary and secondary students have also shown improvement, with stronger sentence fluency, organization, and overall writing quality. Bayless data also shows a decrease in the percentage of students performing in the lowest writing range, across grade levels. Many students are increasingly demonstrating academic writing skills like paragraph structured writing, transitions and multi-sentence explanations.
Dr. Hasanbasic credits much of the program’s success to Bayless teachers, whose commitment to professional learning and deep understanding of their students’ needs have brought the Writing with Design framework to life in classrooms. For one Bayless student, having left Afghanistan due to safety concerns, arrived in St. Louis without her parents and began in the 2023-2024 school year with limited English. Through her hard work and the program’s structured support, she has made remarkable progress and is expressing her ideas with growing confidence, a development Dr. Hasanbasic calls “an inspiring reflection of her resilience and the program’s effectiveness.”
Dr. Hasanbasic adds that the Bayless School District’s work with Writing with Design is a strong example of how intentional, research-based writing instruction can accelerate language growth and empower multilingual learners at every grade level.
“Our students are not just learning English, they are becoming confident writers,” Dr. Hasanbasic said.