Teachers are "busting their tails," Boushee says, but students "were behind and we're still behind." The school saw Happy Numbers as a way to start moving them forward, and now they're closing the gap closer and closer.

About five years ago, a nationally board-certified early reading teacher brought Happy Numbers to Boushee. She had added it to her daily intervention time, pulling aside students the dashboard showed struggling with a skill, and told him her class had closed gaps.

"Well, how do you know you closed gaps?" he asked. Her evidence came from the program's own assessment, and some companies, he says, will tell a school anything to keep it paying. "'Oh, look how much your kids grew.' They grew about that much, but they tell you they grew off the screen."

He and the teacher checked her students' end-of-year results on Istation, which New Mexico requires in kindergarten through second grade, and Star Math. On those tests, "kids that were not ready at the beginning of the year were at grade level."

"I didn't change the way I taught," the teacher told him.

The school ran a free trial for "a good chunk of the school year" and saw growth. "Well, we're fools if we don't do it," Boushee said.

Kirtland bought it and has used it in grades K–6 for about four years. Students work on it during intervention time, he says.

Checking whether a student has an earlier skill can mean a fifth-grade teacher digging out third-grade material, Boushee says. Before a lesson, many of his teachers check the skill reports to see which students are low on a skill the lesson needs, and plan how to pre-teach it. "I think the skill reports for a lot of them is the biggest thing," he says. Some assign that skill to the whole class in Happy Numbers the day before.

An example of the skills report. Each skill has a color for each student (mastered, developing, or help needed), and an icon marks the skill they’re working on now.

"If you teach the lesson and you're missing the skill needed to be successful," he says, "you wasted your time teaching that lesson."

One of Kirtland's biggest plans for improving math is getting students to talk about it, and Boushee says Happy Numbers gives them the knowledge to do that.

"They knew how to do the problem, but they weren't confident in it. Now, they're confident in it." When he walks past a Happy Numbers block, students are talking about the problems and showing their friends. "Look, I got this," they say.

Fourth and fifth graders, who usually "don't want any attention brought to them," hold up their iPads and say something like "I was at “this level”, now I'm at “that level”!"

First grade has benefited the most, Boushee says, and, if he remembers correctly, fifth grade has grown a lot as well. "Our fifth graders are those COVID kindergarteners." On the state's interim assessment, he says, 11 percent of students were at or above target at the beginning of the year and 41 percent at the end. "It's a combination of things, of course."

He sees the most growth in classes that keep up the weekly time the program recommends (about 45 minutes a week, depending on the grade), and a year's growth in every grade. Over his years at the school he has hired only a couple of new teachers, so by his account the one change has been Happy Numbers.

"Can I say 100% that that's the reason? No. But can I say it's a very big contributor? Yes."

Average growth in grade levels for active Kirtland Elementary students with assessment data. Students used Happy Numbers consistently, averaging 35 minutes a week across all grades.

A math consultant doing what Happy Numbers does would cost about $4,000 a day for four or five days a year, about $20,000 in all, Boushee estimates. A teacher can look at the program while students are on it and deal with a problem right away, he says. "No consultant can do that for you."

The biggest piece, he says, is that teachers shouldn't "dump their kids on it" or use it as "a station babysitter."

Leaders who buy math books for teachers can't tell whether anyone reads them, Boushee says. "It's very easy to look at Happy Numbers and know they're using it."

If the district won't pay for it, he says, "I will find a way out of whichever budget I can to make it work because I think it's vital for kids."