Robert Dominguez is the principal of Montara Elementary School, which serves transitional kindergarten (TK) through fourth grade in Barstow, California. He spent about two years looking for a supplemental math program, and the publishers he talked to were trying to sell him after-school tutoring. "My kids need something that they can utilize in the classroom while they're doing small group instruction with a teacher and working on independent lessons with a program," he says.

The program also had to work during school hours, hold students' interest, and reach every grade from TK through fourth.

"One of the reasons we were looking at another supplemental program is to reach those Tier 2 students and start filling in those gaps without shoveling more kids into special ed," Dominguez says.

Students arrive at Montara with gaps wherever they come from, he says. At least one-third of them are moving in or out of the school, and he counts Montara's mobility rate among the highest in San Bernardino County. "If they're coming from LA, San Diego, or Las Vegas, the majority of them are coming in with gaps because they're moving all the time."

Dominguez shares leadership with his staff and doesn't just mandate programs, so Montara tested Happy Numbers in what he calls a "mini research." It compared Happy Numbers with the math program the school had already chosen, on program-embedded and curriculum-embedded test scores and on how students and teachers responded to each program.

"We had one classroom as a test classroom," he says. "That classroom's scores were about 10 to 15% higher than the other two. The kids in the control classrooms were asking, 'Hey, how come we're not doing that math program? We want to do that. It sounds fun.'"

Dominguez has his teachers deliver Tier 1 instruction and then switch to Tier 2 work in centers set up around the classroom. "One would be the computerized program, another would be a small group with the teacher, and another would be more hands-on like a STEM project," he says.

Once students got used to the program, they used it without adult help. "It was very easy for the students to use, especially four-year-olds," Dominguez says. Teachers told him it was much easier to use than other computerized programs the school had used before.

In these example Pre-K tasks, students count and trace the number 3, then pick it out. The program reads every instruction aloud, so even four-year-olds can work on their own.

Teachers used the reports, on top of their own analysis of assessment data, to find the specific skills students were missing. They grouped students by those skills or assigned Happy Numbers lessons to reinforce them.

Dominguez looked at the usage report himself. "My number one concern is if I'm spending taxpayers' dollars on a program, I want it utilized," he says. "If the usage report is not showing that, then I have conversations with my staff, but it really was very easy for them to utilize and implement in the classroom."

The return on investment is there "because kids are learning," Dominguez says. He has taught his staff a model of how people learn, and correcting misconceptions is one part of it. "Happy Numbers does that; it breaks apart some of their misconceptions and rebuilds them, building on their conceptual framework."

Students could explain what they were learning in Happy Numbers and connect it to the core curriculum in class, he says.

"I'm a data person," Dominguez says. When principals and district leaders ask how Montara is showing growth, he plans to explain that the school bought Happy Numbers to shore up gaps and address students' misconceptions about math concepts, and then show them the beginning-, middle-, and end-of-year data.

"Nothing that I was able to find other than Happy Numbers fit those three components," he says.