At Martin Middle School, multilingual learners led the way in academic growth. During the 2025-26 school year, students achieved exceptional growth in reading and math, with the strongest gains among those who engaged most deeply with Medley's proficiency-aligned scaffolds.
Median i-Ready
Reading Growth
(+34 pts vs. non-MLs)
Median i-Ready
Math Growth
(+47 pts vs. non-MLs)
WIDA ACCESS Score Improvement
ACCESS Growth for
High-Usage Students
vs. Lower Usage
Taunton Public Schools serves more than 8,000 students across 13 schools in southeastern Massachusetts, including a growing population of multilingual learners (MLs). The district has made ML success a central component of its instructional strategy, investing in high-quality instructional materials, dedicated staffing, and school-level systems that keep MLs at the center of instructional planning.
With a growing ML population, their challenge is one that districts across the country are navigating: giving students the language support they need across all content areas without lowering the rigor of what they are learning.
In Taunton, this work is led by Dalila Mendoza, Director of Multilingual Programs and Title I. Instructional Coach Megan Fernando supports the school-level work at Martin Middle School.
Taunton has made a deliberate commitment to ensuring multilingual learners have access to the same rigorous, grade-level curriculum as their peers — not separate or simplified materials. But language can create a barrier between what students are capable of understanding and what they can independently access. Without the right supports in the moment, students may struggle to fully participate in the rigorous instructional goals the district has created.
Providing those supports consistently is difficult to scale. Relying upon teachers to create individualized scaffolds themselves depends heavily on their time, expertise, and capacity. Even with strong educators and multilingual programming in place, ensuring every student gets the right level of support across classrooms, subjects, and grade levels remains a challenge.
To scale language supports, Taunton partnered with Medley Learning during the 2025–26 school year, beginning with a focused implementation at Martin Middle School. Instead of asking teachers to create every support themselves, or pulling students away from grade-level instruction, Medley gave multilingual learners individualized, proficiency-aligned scaffolds as they worked through their everyday content classes. Students could get help with the language in front of them while continuing to engage with the same rigorous material as their peers.
By using Medley in content area classes, multilingual learners at Martin Middle School were able to participate more independently in rigorous, grade-level instruction while receiving individualized language support at the point of need.
Students can log right in, the tool's right there, we plug in the data and it provides the students with exactly what they need when they need it.
By the end of the 2025–26 school year, multilingual learners at Martin Middle School were making exceptional academic progress. On the i-Ready Diagnostic, students achieved 163% of expected annual growth in reading and 139% in math — well beyond the growth expected over the course of a typical year. Nearly three-quarters met their expected growth target in reading. Two-thirds did so in math.
Median Typical Growth
% Met Typical Growth
% Improved Placement Level
This is the first time I've been able to write this much.
There needs to be a point person at each school that believes in it as strongly as I believe in it in order for it to be as successful as it's been.
To optimize success, Mendoza and Fernando paired Medley with an intentional implementation strategy designed to build consistent use within core classes. A few practices helped make that possible:
Leadership at both levels
A clear district vision paired with a strong school-level champion.
Start focused, then build
Martin began with a defined group of students and expanded as teachers gained confidence.
Learn from the data
Usage data helped leaders identify areas for support and for celebration, rather than being used only to monitor compliance.
Build belief through student success
Visible student wins helped build teacher confidence and momentum for expansion.
Embed support across content areas
Scaffolding access to grade-level HQIM helped language development happen in every classroom.
Following the successful implementation and strong student outcomes at Martin, Taunton expanded the approach to its other middle schools and the high school, using what was learned at Martin as a model for implementation across the district.
What Taunton Shows
The takeaway from Martin is simple: students who engaged more deeply with proficiency-aligned scaffolds also saw greater academic and language growth. That impact was supported by a commitment to grade-level instruction and intentional implementation of Medley across content areas. The research on scaffolding for multilingual learners isn’t new. Martin showed that with Medley, it’s possible to deliver that support consistently and at scale.
