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Background & Context
Best Academy is a fully remote, independent study K-12 charter school in California. It serves close to 1,000 students who log in from the San Diego area, including Chula Vista and San Ysidro, along with Riverside, Orange County, and Imperial. About 208 of those students are English learners.
Running a remote campus means EL Director Natalie Maldonado can't lean on hallway conversations or classroom drop-ins to see how a program is really working. Every solution has to prove itself through what happens on screen, in the data, and in how students sound when they speak.
The Challenge
Before adopting Summit K12, Best Academy spent years searching for an ELD program. The programs they found were either built for adult learners, heavy on conversational speaking but too light on reading and writing, or designed for young children. None of them worked for the school's full K-12 student population, and some missed one of the four language domains entirely.
Maldonado needed a program that treated listening, speaking, reading, and writing as connected skills, and that could meet every student with content that matched their proficiency level and grade-band expectations. Connect to Literacy was exactly what she'd been looking for.
The Solution
When the team discovered Summit K12's Connect to Literacy, they chose it as the school's designated ELD core curriculum. It became part of students' everyday coursework, and EL students worked on their personalized learning plans every day.
Students receive targeted listening, speaking, reading, and writing practice in a format aligned to the performance tasks they'll see on the ELPAC assessment. That alignment matters. Before Connect to Literacy, the language on the ELPAC looked so different from what students had practiced in class that many struggled to show what they knew, even when they understood the content. Now, students recognize the format and walk into the assessment confident they can succeed.
“When I see the students taking their ELPAC assessment, I hear them say, ‘It's Summit K12,’ and they get excited because they know what to do.”
— Natalie Maldonado, EL Director, Best Academy
Teachers see the shift too. Maldonado regularly hears from staff who log in to listen to recordings of their students speaking English. That feature turns quiet, steady progress into something the whole team can hear and celebrate.
For Maldonado, the personalized learning plan is what ties it all together. Students take a beginning-of-year and middle-of-year assessment, and the program builds a plan around exactly what each student needs next.
“This is the one program I know that really meets students where they are. The fact that they're working on listening, speaking, reading, and writing, and that they all connect to each other, is so important.”
— Natalie Maldonado
The reports built into Connect to Literacy give teachers that same clarity. Maldonado uploads growth data from the beginning-, middle-, and end-of-year assessments, broken out by language domain, so teachers know exactly where to focus next, building on a student's strong speaking skills to push their writing to the next level, for example.
Most Impactful Features
- Personalized learning plans built from beginning-, middle-, and end-of-year assessments
- Practice aligned to real ELPAC performance tasks across all four language domains
- Teacher access to student speaking and writing samples, not just scores
- Admin growth reports covering every language domain in one place
- One core ELD curriculum that works for kindergarten through twelfth grade
Impact & Results
California's growth formula is complex, but by Maldonado's own count, more than 50% of Best Academy's English learners had already demonstrated growth, and the trend was moving in the right direction.
The clearest proof came from watching students take the test itself. Students who once froze during the speaking portion of the ELPAC returned this year with a different posture.
Some of the best proof arrives by phone. Maldonado might be in the middle of a tedious report when a teacher calls, too excited to wait.
“I just gave the ELPAC test to a student who did not speak a single word to me in English when I first met them, and now they're answering, they got through the test. That is such an accomplishment, because you just see the growth.”
— Natalie Maldonado relays teacher feedback
Ongoing Partnership and Support
For Maldonado, this work is personal. She is an English learner herself, and she remembers what it felt like to sit down for a test in a language that didn't yet feel like her own.
“As an English learner myself, I remember the fear and anxiety of taking these tests, because it's in a language that you're not comfortable with. Now I see them thinking - I know how to do this.”
— Natalie Maldonado
That shift, from fear to confidence, is what keeps Best Academy coming back to Summit K12 as its core ELD program. With Connect to Literacy woven into daily instruction across every grade, Maldonado and her team are continuing to watch EL students find their voice, grow, and continue to succeed.
