School board discusses creating literacy policy

Charleston County School Board members took another step Monday toward making literacy the district's top priority and creating a policy to back that up.

The school board doesn't have a policy outlining its expectations for students' reading ability but decided to create one after a series of newspaper articles revealed the severe reading problems facing local students. Nearly 20 percent of the county's ninth-graders read on a fourth-grade level or worse.

The board's policy committee has been toiling on a proposed literacy policy since June. The latest draft makes literacy the district's "highest imperative, ranking above every other educational goal" and requires students to be reading at or above a ninth-grade level. It mandates that the superintendent ensures that children are reading proficiently by the end of third grade, that intervention be given each year to students who aren't reading on grade level and that the district's budget be aligned with accomplishing these goals before any other.

The committee sent the proposed policy to the district's leadership for feedback, and district Chief Academic Officer Doug Gepford as well as Assessment and Accountability Executive Director Janet Rose came to the board committee meeting Tuesday to update board members on their progress. They've vetted the policy with teachers, principals and administrators, and everyone supports having this type of policy, Gepford said. They've also surveyed seven other in- and out-of-state school districts about their reading policies, and only one, Greenville County, had a policy specifically on reading.

The issue that's troubling district officials is how to define what reading on specific grade levels means, Gepford said. The district didn't look at students' grade-level reading abilities before prompted by the newspaper, although it did know how many students weren't reading on grade level, Rose said. There's not a consensus on what it means to read at each grade level, and Rose said she could use dozens of measures to correlate students' scores with grade-level reading ability.

Tests are designed to show the skills in which students are deficient, rather than define their specific grade-level reading, and that's more valuable for educators, she said. Rose didn't feel comfortable picking one test or metric that would define students' reading skills by grade level.

Board members gave officials feedback, reiterating their desire to put the district's literacy goals in writing. Board Vice Chairman Gregg Meyers acknowledged the difficulty in picking one system but said the board didn't need to articulate in policy what that system should be. The board does need to ensure that its policy underscores the importance of reading, he said, adding that he didn't want to lose sight of that being its primary objective.

"At some point, we have to know who's not reading well," he said. "We, the board, help the organization by saying that's where you really have to dig in."

Gepford told the committee that the board's directive on this issue has sharpened the administration's attention to it, and they wanted to give schools sound targets to accomplish. Gepford said he expects to return to the committee with recommended changes at its next meeting in November.