Parish school system talks literacy improvements
Literacy rates among lower elementary students in Lincoln Parish aren’t actually as low as the state education department described in a recent reading report, district officials say. The parish is also implementing new measures to further raise students’ reading levels over the next few years.
Earlier this month the Louisiana Department of Education released a reading report that showed just under half of students statewide were reading on grade level this fall, and Lincoln Parish’s grades K-2 were shown to have literacy rates between 43% and 53%.
But those results are based on a one-time, third-party screener at the outset of the school year. The situation looks better when viewed through the continuous literacy monitoring system that the district uses courtesy of its new reading curriculum, according to Chief Academic Officer Dana Talley and K-2 Coordinator Michelle Thrower.
“At the end of last school year, our rate for on-target reading level in K-2 was 67.1%,” Talley said. “At the end of this year, our goal is 80% of kids reading on grade level. At the end of 2026, our goal is 90%. And we can do it.”
Several changes are driving Lincoln Parish’s push for higher elementary-grade literacy: A new Tier 1 curriculum from the American Reading Company, a contingent of full-time “coaches” hired to assist teachers in implementing the curriculum, a summer program specifically for reading remediation, and 54 hours of state-mandated training on the “science of reading.”
The district is using part of its federal Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funding to pay for two subject-matter coaches based at each of the parish’s K-6 schools, one for English and reading and one for math.
ESSER funds are also going toward providing the training that the Legislature is now requiring all K-2 teachers to undergo, training that Talley said will be spread out across the district’s preexisting teacher in-service days throughout the year.
“The science of reading training will help the new curriculum make sense to teachers,” she said. “It’s kind of the ‘why’ behind it. But 55 hours is a challenge.”
The training currently costs about $26,000 for 30 people.
“But if we have three people, it’s still $26,000,” Talley said. “We can’t bring in a vendor at that cost for two or three people. So we have to figure out a way it can be sustainable going forward.”
In the meantime, parents can expect an overhaul of the summer school offerings provided for the first time last year, this time featuring a more specific focus.
“We’re going to narrow the focus this summer,” Talley said. “Mainly it’ll be K-2 and we’ll do reading and some math.
“Any kid who is not reading on grade level by May, we want to call it something more like a reading camp rather than summer school. Spend that time making sure they’re reading on grade level by the time they finish summer school.”
Reading on “grade level” is determined by standards from the state-approved curriculum and monitored by teachers continuously throughout the school year.
There are several reading levels within each grade that have their own books assigned to them, books containing appropriate difficulties of words for that level. Teachers monitor students’ ability to keep up with those books and move them up as appropriate.
The state as a whole is launching a new push for higher literacy rates driven by multiple new laws from last year’s legislative session and patterned on similar efforts from Mississippi that catapulted their numbers over the previous decade.
