'You can't believe they can't read.'

One out of every five Alice Birney Middle School students reads so poorly that he needs daily intensive reading classes, sometimes at the second-grade level.

School Principal Carol Beckmann-Bartlett took a dramatic step this school year in being honest about the problem facing 120 of the North Charleston school's roughly 600 students and refusing to allow it to continue under her watch.

Sixth-, seventh- and eighth-grade students forego lessons in physical education, art and some even miss out on science or social studies to take basic reading classes.

It's a calculated gamble that she has taken with the school district's approval. The school has committed students' instructional time, teachers and money to the effort, and the principal realizes that their progress might not immediately improve the school's test scores. But Beckmann-Bartlett felt a moral obligation. Once she realized how many of her students couldn't read, she couldn't ignore their plight.

"You can't believe they can't read," Beckmann-Bartlett said. "The data hurts. I don't know what happened."

Other Charleston County middle schools are beginning to move toward offering a similar program, but no other school is as far along as Birney Middle in screening students to determine their specific reading deficiencies and addressing them through instruction.

Teaching adolescents to read

The decision to teach basic reading to Birney students began with school psychologist Amber Brundage. She helps middle schools handle students who have problems, and she realized a significant number of Birney students were misbehaving to mask their illiteracy.

"It was realizing, across the board, we've got a systemic issue with kids who can't read," she said.

The problem was so global that focusing on individual children wouldn't work, and she told Beckmann-Bartlett last school year that they needed to screen incoming fifth-graders as well as sixth- and seventh-graders they suspected of having reading difficulty to specifically identify their deficiencies, whether they're fluency, vocabulary or comprehension. Beckmann-Bartlett agreed.

Middle school students should be able to read 150 words per minute. Some Birney students can read only 20. Some students don't know the difference between consonant or vowel sounds. Others concentrate so hard on understanding individual words that they don't understand what they've read at the end of a passage.

It's a similar problem facing middle schools across the nation. Only 15 percent of low-income eighth-graders nationwide read at or above a proficient level, and in South Carolina that percentage is 11, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. About half of the incoming ninth-graders in urban, high-poverty schools nationally read three or more years below grade level. It's an impediment to students' learning and dooms many to failure.

Most schools stop formal reading instruction in elementary grades, and reading in middle and high school is done mostly so students can learn information rather than how to read better. But an increasing amount of attention and advocacy has been directed to the issue of adolescent literacy.

Birney Middle uses reading programs that are detailed and specific enough so that a middle school science teacher who doesn't know how to teach reading could teach those basic skills.

Teachers approach these students' problems with reading in a way similar to how they approach teaching special needs students. Tests determined the specific areas of reading that students struggle with, and teachers work to address those specific issues.

Many believed the misconception that students who needed this kind of prescriptive help must be considered special education, Brundage said. They didn't realize that students hadn't been taught the reading skills they needed.

"We used to not be able to fathom not having a disability and being that low of a reader," she said.

Elementary school lessons

Some Birney Middle students take reading classes that could be found in a second-grade classroom. During one lesson this year, reading teacher Sarah Donovan scrawled five words on the white board — "an, tap, champ, shack, add." She said each word aloud and told her students to repeat after her. Students then took turns standing, reading the words on the board and returning to their seats.

Some children struggled with this simple reading exercise. One girl leaves the "h" out of the word champ. Another mispronounced the "a" vowel sound.

Although these are basic reading classes, they are what students need, and it's showing up in test results. Seventy-three percent of the school's worst readers made more than one year's worth of gains between September and March, and every grade in the school showed an average of one year of growth during that same time.

Birney eighth-grader Kania Hill has grown up in Charleston schools, but she read on a fifth-grade level this fall. She knew teachers put her in the intensive reading classes because of the difficulty she had with reading.

She fell behind in one of her classes last year because she took so long to read the assigned books. She tried to take the books home to read, but even with the extra work, she couldn't catch up.

She stayed silent during class discussions because she hadn't read that far in the book, and she felt frustrated that she didn't understand what others were saying, she said.

She feared reading aloud in class, and she didn't want people to make fun of her inability to read.

For years, she simply skipped the words that she didn't know, and she didn't ask her teachers for help. She felt afraid they would discover she couldn't read and not promote her to the next grade. She earned Ds and Fs.

This year, Hill asks questions when she doesn't understand something.

"I know they want to help me," she said.

Instead of taking science or social studies, she spent two hours daily in her reading class. She liked the class because it's small, other students read at the same pace, and she received the help she needs.

Diamond Singleton also has been educated in Charleston's public schools, but the eighth-grader was in the same reading class as Hill this fall. She's aware that she couldn't read well, and she knew she didn't receive the help she needed years ago.

She had a particularly difficult time with reading aloud, and she would read as slowly as possible when called upon in class. She tried to teach herself, but she knew she needed help.

She didn't like to read, but Donovan's class helped change her mind. She liked being in a class where other people can't read all the words.

"I told her that I will start reading better and more," she said.

She feared asking for help, but now she doesn't. She stops when she sees words she doesn't know, and she sounds them out until she understands them. She's not scared to read aloud because she knows others have similar problems.

"I wish that when I came to this school that they had this," she said. "I would be better at reading. You're learning something that you wasn't taught a long time ago."