State Schools Superintendent David Roach has turned another page in his effort to improve reading literacy for West Virginia youngsters.
Members of his newly appointed Literacy Council met for their first meeting last week in Charleston to begin outlining that mission.
The 30-member group, which includes education professionals and others from private business and nonprofit organizations, is an outgrowth of Roach’s “Ready, Read, Write West Virginia” campaign, which launched in December.
Roach came up with the initiative in response to dismal reading scores turned in by West Virginia — and everywhere else — during that fall’s national assessments in that discipline.
The U.S. Department of Education put out a report card in October, and scores, as said, were at record lows across the nation, with the onset of COVID in 2020 — and the shift to remote learning required at the height of the pandemic — considered a chief culprit in the achievement-drop.
West Virginia came in under that flattened curve.
Fourth-grade reading scores, as chronicled in that report card, averaged out to 205 in school districts across the Mountain State, opposed to 216 nationally in the assessment.
Eighth-grade reading scores came in at 249 for West Virginia, and 259 elsewhere.
“Ready, Read, Write West Virginia,” the superintendent said, is as simple as reading aloud to your kid — and, whenever possible, going on field trips to the places he’s reading about, even if it’s a local historical building.
It’s about making a connection, Roach said, from the writings on a page, to a real-time regarding of the subject that before only existed in the imagination.
Visit the state Department of Education’s website at https://wvde.us/ for video primers and other particulars on the campaign.
In the meantime, there’s the outreach work of the Literacy Council to follow, the superintendent said.
Roach said he likes the cross-section of the council, with its mix of educators, business leaders and parents.
A Monongalia County representative already checked several of those boxes just by showing up.
Amber Nichols, who was named to the council, teaches kindergarten at Eastwood Elementary School, and is also West Virginia’s State Teacher of the Year for 2023.
Meanwhile, the president of the state Board of Education is already a fan, saying he likes the read-aloud aspect and whole teaching philosophy of the initiative.
“We have to change what we’re doing,” Paul Hardesty said, “if we want to see different results.”
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