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It was an organized affair in Haley Weizmann's Eastern Middle School classroom last week.

In a remote corner of the class, seventh-graders Audrianna Clarke and Banesa Lara sat in a makeshift living room and quietly read books, while three other students sat with Weizmann at tables in the middle of the classroom to learn about photosynthesis.

On the computers, students like Oumaron Bitang participated in what is called the reading zone, where a voice would recite a paragraph, and he would repeat what he read on the screen.

The 11-student class was participating in the national Scholastic Read 180 program, a 90-minute intervention course in middle schools and high schools that uses workbooks and technology to help struggling readers, most of whom read at least two years below their grade level.

The Read 180 program is geared toward students in general education or special education or whose native language is not English. The goal of the program is to drill into the students the importance of reading and writing so they become self-reliant readers and writers.

"There is much research that shows the more students read, the better readers they become, so they [must] have engaging texts" at a readable level, said Ann E. Bedford, the school system's director of school support, interventions and assessments.

And the program, Weizmann said, makes them "practice their skills and develop an interest in [reading]."

Every marking period, students are given Scholastic's reading inventory tests to determine if their skills have improved. At the end of the year, administrators use the Maryland School Assessments and High School Assessments to determine students' progress in reading.

The school system is working on an evaluation to determine the success of Read 180. But anecdotally, "schools are reporting much student success," Bedford said.

Launched in 2003 as a small program, Read 180 is now in every middle school and high school except Winston Churchill High School in Potomac and Thomas W. Pyle Middle School in Bethesda. Those schools, Bedford said, believe they already have interventions in place to help their struggling readers.

The school system has spent roughly $2 million on Read 180, which includes reading materials, workbooks and licenses from Scholastic, one of the world's largest publishers and distributors of children's books, to run the program.

There are no plans to expand the Read 180 program to elementary schools, Bedford said.

While the content of the books, which Scholastic provides, is aligned with the school system's middle school and high school curriculum, the Read 180 books are easier to read.

"Since the students are reading several years below grade level, it is important to have engaging and grade-level appropriate content at a less challenging level," Bedford said.

Eastern Middle School has the greatest need in the county for the Read 180 program, with 120 spaces available for the program. Silver Spring International Middle School, with 110 spaces available, ranks second.

The school system relies on data and teacher recommendations to determine who needs the Read 180 program.

At Silver Spring International yesterday morning, Ernese Lawson Walters' eighth-grade Read 180 class read about marine biology and photosynthesis.

The first 30 minutes of the class were dedicated to group learning, and her 15 students sat around a long table and read passages from a Scholastic workbook. Then, every 10 minutes, the students broke up into groups of five and either read aloud with the teacher, read independently or recited passages from the computer software.

After the students read passages, they were asked to fill out a log to show they comprehended what they read.

If a student had trouble pronouncing a word, Walters wrote it phonetically in black ink on a white erase board, and then asked the student to repeat the word.

By the end of the 90-minute class, the words "hy/dro/ther/mal" and "hy/dro/gen" were in plain view, near a poster with the word "can't" crossed out.