High-Need District Coaching: What Meriden Built

Meriden, Connecticut has the lowest per-pupil funding of any school district in the state. More than three-quarters of its nearly 9,000 students come from low-income families. Based on those numbers alone, a data analyst would project that a small fraction of Meriden’s third graders are reading on grade level.

Seven of eight Meriden elementary schools are outperforming those projections, some by a wide margin. Pulaski Elementary, the district’s highest-need campus, serves a student population with an 87.7 percent poverty rate. Analysts expected 16.4 percent of students to read on grade level. Measured performance came in at nearly 54 percent, according to The 74’s Bright Spot data project, which identified schools in the top 5 percent of their state for outscoring expected reading proficiency.

Meriden’s scores aren’t the interesting question. The interesting question is what, specifically, they are doing, and whether it is transferable.

The short answer: they built a coaching infrastructure. The longer answer is about what that phrase actually means in practice.

What “We Have Coaches” Usually Looks Like

Most districts that claim to have instructional coaching have some version of this: a coach assigned to a school, available to teachers who seek them out, focused on whoever needs the most immediate help. The coach is often pulled into coverage duties when staffing gets thin. Their load is reactive. There is no consistent schedule of observations, no shared curriculum planning, and no unified approach to what coaching sessions are supposed to accomplish.

Those coaches work hard. The problem is that the system around them lacks the architecture to make their work consistent at scale.

Meriden’s model looks different on almost every one of those dimensions.

Daily Presence as a Non-Negotiable

The most visible element of Meriden’s approach is the frequency of classroom presence. Dan Crispino, the district’s director of school leadership, spent more than 20 years as a first grade teacher and later as a principal before moving to a central office role in 2020. He and the district’s building principals spend most of their time in classrooms, at least four visits per day.

Early on, that wasn’t easy to establish. Staff had concerns about the volume of administrator presence. Over time, the dynamic shifted. As Crispino described it to The 74: “We’re not there to get you, there’s a difference. For support and accountability, we’re going to be there.”

The shift from “evaluation” to “support and accountability” is more than language. It changes what principals are listening for, what they write down, and how they talk to teachers after the visit. When presence becomes routine, it stops feeling like an audit. It becomes part of how the school operates.

Coaches Who Own the Curriculum

Meriden’s instructional coaches are grade-level assigned and rotate across campuses. That design decision matters: a coach who works with all third grade teachers across the district builds a coherent picture of what is and is not working at that grade level. They are not siloed to one building.

But the design element that is easiest to overlook is what the coaches are actually responsible for. In Meriden, coaches organize curriculum into detailed unit-preview emails delivered before each unit starts. These emails include lesson breakdowns, assessment structures, specific test questions to watch for, pacing guides, and explicit connections to state standards.

That is not what coaching usually looks like. Most coaching programs are built around observation and feedback cycles. Meriden’s coaches are doing that work, but they are also absorbing the curriculum planning load that would otherwise fall entirely on individual teachers.

The result, as Veronica Germe, a K-3 English language arts and math coach in the district, described it: “We’ve almost become a catch all in the district for all the questions K-5.”

Germe compared Meriden’s model to her previous experience in Hartford, a larger Connecticut district: “Visibility is the biggest difference.” In Hartford, she recalled seeing a principal in her classroom once during an entire school year.

Coaches in Meriden meet with teachers at least once a week for planning sessions. They also observe classroom instruction and offer real-time support. Germe described the relationship coaches have built with teachers: “We’re not evaluating them. We’re there in it with them. We’re helping and we want to get to know the students too. Their scores are our scores.”

Shared Language Across Every Building

In mid-March, a reporter from The 74 walked into Pulaski, Nathan Hale, and Thomas Hooker elementary schools during their reading rotation blocks. The classrooms looked nearly identical: same structural format, same rotation logic, same evidence-paper routine, even as individual teachers made their own choices about laptops versus printed materials versus whiteboards.

That consistency is not an accident. It is the product of district-wide alignment around a common schedule, common curriculum, and common coaching touchpoints.

Crispino’s phrase for it is “speaking the same language.” Every third grade class across the district works the same material on the same schedule. Every teacher in that grade gets the same unit-preview email from their coach. Every building leader uses the same framework for feedback.

This kind of alignment is harder than it sounds to create. It requires a master schedule that is actually workable. Meriden’s original schedule had teachers starting reading at the same time recess was supposed to end, which meant no two classrooms were actually in sync. Crispino described that version as “not, physically, mathematically, possible.” The first step was making the schedule viable. Everything else built from there.

The district also built in a reteach day at the end of every unit to address concepts where students needed more time. That design decision reflects something important: the system responds to what is actually happening in classrooms, instead of executing a plan in isolation.

The Infrastructure Question Most Districts Skip

Meriden’s reading gains have been building for nearly a decade. They did not come from a single intervention, a new curriculum adoption, or a charismatic principal. They came from sustained investment in the structural conditions that make coaching effective.

When Connecticut implemented a new state mandate limiting which curricula elementary schools could use for reading instruction, Meriden’s transition was, in Crispino’s word, “phenomenal.” Teachers already had coaches, pacing guides, and planning support. The curriculum changed; the infrastructure did not.

That is the harder part of the Meriden story to transfer. The coaching frequency, the shared planning, the consistent walkthrough presence: all of it requires time, resources, and a clear commitment from district leadership that this is how the work gets done.

Crispino was direct about what it takes for other districts to replicate the model: “Can districts have a schedule like we do? Yes, but you have to make sure you’re consistent with it. Can you have instructional coaches do the work we’re doing? Yes. Should admin be in rooms? Yes.” And then: “You have to push [your staff and kids] to an uncomfortable place, to challenge each other, have professional dialog and have high expectations, but then give them the resources to be successful.”

The resources piece is not rhetorical. Meriden’s elementary coaches are funded through Title I, the federal program for schools with high concentrations of students from low-income families. The district has protected those positions through budget constraints that have reduced other spending.

What Districts Can Do When Coach Density Is Out of Reach

Meriden’s model is built on a team of about a dozen coaches serving eight elementary schools. That ratio (roughly 1.5 coaches per school) is the foundation of the system. For most districts, replicating that ratio is not feasible in the near term. Coaching positions are expensive. Qualified instructional coaches are hard to find and harder to retain.

The structural insight from Meriden goes beyond “hire more coaches.” Teachers need consistent, structured support between formal coaching cycles. Leaders need to be in classrooms frequently enough to understand what is actually happening in instruction.

Those two problems are exactly where tools like AI Coach by Edthena and Observation Copilot are designed to help. AI Coach gives teachers access to on-demand, structured coaching conversations between visits from a human coach. It is built on the same research-backed coaching methodology that drives effective coaching cycles: goal-setting, reflection on practice, and identifying specific next steps. A teacher who has a planning conversation with a coach on Monday and then engages with AI Coach on Thursday is not replacing the human relationship. They are getting more practice with reflective thinking in the days between.

Observation Copilot addresses the principal side of the equation. Principals who want to be in classrooms four times a day, as Meriden’s leaders are, run into the same friction most school leaders face: the feedback obligation that follows every walkthrough. Observation Copilot helps principals turn brief classroom visits into structured, framework-aligned feedback faster, without the hours of write-up time that currently keeps many administrators behind their desks.

Neither tool is a substitute for what Meriden has built. A coaching culture with daily presence, shared language, and grade-level coach assignments takes years to construct. But for districts that are not starting from that infrastructure level, technology can extend the reach of the coaches and leaders already in the building.

Meriden demonstrates that high-need districts have a different limit than their demographics or funding levels suggest. The actual limit is whether they have the instructional infrastructure to support consistent, high-quality teaching across every classroom, every day. Building that infrastructure is the work. The outcomes follow.

Frequently Asked Questions

What did Meriden, CT do to improve elementary reading scores?

Meriden’s approach combined daily administrator classroom visits, grade-level instructional coaches assigned across campuses, consistent curriculum planning support delivered via unit-preview emails before each unit, and a districtwide master schedule that aligned all classrooms to the same content and pacing. According to The 74’s Bright Spot data project (April 2026), seven of eight Meriden elementary schools outperformed their expected reading proficiency rates.

How many instructional coaches does Meriden have, and how are they organized?

Meriden employs approximately a dozen elementary instructional coaches, assigned by grade level and rotating among campuses rather than being placed in a single building. This structure allows coaches to observe patterns across the district and ensure consistency. The positions are funded through Title I federal grants for schools with high concentrations of students from low-income families.

What makes daily classroom walkthroughs effective for instructional improvement?

Research on instructional leadership consistently finds that frequent classroom presence improves both principal understanding of instruction and, when paired with meaningful feedback, teacher practice. The key distinction in Meriden’s approach is framing walkthroughs as support rather than evaluation. As director of school leadership Dan Crispino described it: “For support and accountability, we’re going to be there.” Frequency normalizes the presence and shifts the dynamic from inspection to partnership.

How can a district build stronger coaching infrastructure without adding many coaches?

Districts can extend coaching capacity through structured reflection tools that give teachers between-cycle support, and observation tools that reduce the feedback write-up time that keeps principals from spending more time in classrooms. The goal is to increase the frequency and consistency of instructional support without proportionally increasing headcount, while keeping human coaching relationships at the center. Meriden’s model is the aspiration; tools that close the gap between coaching visits are the practical path forward for most districts.

Source: Jessika Harkay, “High-Need Connecticut School District Doing ‘Things People Don’t Believe Are Possible’,” The 74, April 14, 2026.