The last group of field trips I scheduled for the 2024 school year was with the now-defunct Eagle Charter School. We created stories together, with my boss collecting ideas from the children and me typing them on a large-screen projector. However, amid all the excited yells and bombarding questions, I clearly remember one interaction. While the students finished their stories, I passed a fifth-grade girl with a completely blank page and asked if I could help her. She quickly told me she couldn’t read or write — she didn’t understand a single word written by the chaperones on brightly colored sticky notes, nor the words I typed in Arial font. The only thing I could think to say was, “Do the best you can.”
“When I moved to teach fifth grade at a new school in Vegas, the fifth-graders I taught had even lower literacy skills than the second-graders,” says Mallory O’Loughlin, a teacher who had worked at Eagle Charter School. “At that grade level, the expectation is that the kids can read, and you’re teaching them to analyze what they are reading. Almost all our work time, though, was going back to those foundational skills of spelling and reading.”
As the Clark County School District begins another school year on August 11, with much attention sure to focus on new superintendent Jhone M. Ebert, childhood literacy remains a pressing issue. During the last decade, CCSD has seen ebbs and flows in its students’ reading proficiency. According to Clark County’s Assessment, Accountability, Research, and School Improvement (AARSI) Division’s Focus 2024 performance scorecard, 40 percent of students in grades 3-5 were considered proficient in reading based on their Smarter Balanced Assessment scores, compared to the 2023 target of 65 percent. When only measuring Title I Schools, the percentage of proficient students drops to 34 percent.
Some obvious factors have led to this decline in reading proficiency; namely, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, which can be seen with a district-wide decline from roughly 50 percent reading-proficient students in 2019 to a bit less than 36 percent in 2021. In addition, literacy is an often-misunderstood skill, thought to be a part of a person’s natural development. In his book Reading in a Digital Age, associate professor and East Carolina University federal documents and social sciences librarian David M. Durant explains that “the ability to read is not innate — that is, we are not born able to read. It is a learned skill. The human brain is not designed for reading; rather, reading developed as a result of a phenomenon called neuroplasticity.” Neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to grow — to rearrange its neural connections — in response to life experiences and learning. Especially rapid growth happens during the first few years of life; this is when we develop the building blocks that will lead to more advanced learning throughout someone’s lifetime.
Anna Russian, a seventh-grade CCSD English teacher, explains what happens when students continue their academic careers while falling behind their target reading levels. “Although I am not a licensed teacher in elementary school education, I found myself purchasing a phonics poster and frequently referring my students to the chart when they don’t know how to pronounce a word. Some of my students are nervous about sounding words out, and I’m not sure if it’s because they’re nervous, or because they genuinely haven’t been provided the tools to learn.”
Teaching children how to read during the early stages in their development is only part of the solution. Harrison White, a licensed 6th-12th-grade CCSD English teacher, stresses the importance of writing. “A lot of students are reluctant readers because they are also reluctant writers,” White says. “So working with them on that tends to be the way forward to show how to build confidence and get the forms down.”
Literacy is a lattice-structured skill that can be easily taken for granted because of how often it’s used. Fortunately, because of how crucial it is to children’s academic success, there are resources available to help ensure that children can gain those building blocks during those critical early years. One national example is Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, a program that sends books to children across the country from infancy to age 5. On the Imagination Library’s YouTube channel, Parton says the project was inspired by her father. “Now, he was the wisest man I had ever known, but I knew in my heart this inability to read probably kept him from seeing all of his dreams come true. So, inspiring kids to love to read became my passion and my mission because if you can read, you can teach yourself anything.” Similarly, but on a local level, the organization Spread the Word Nevada has collected and distributed thousands of books to students at many at-risk schools across the state.
It’s not impossible for children like the girl from my field trip to eventually be able to read at a satisfactory level — as long as they’re given extensive time and practice outside of school. As it was, she did the best she could. Instead of contributing to the group story, she ended up creating her own. It was two lines long, without a single word spelled correctly; the letters were heavy, dark, and crooked. I told her I was glad she had finished, and we read her story along with the rest of the students’. Still, I spent the rest of the field trip wondering what she could have written if she’d been given the chance to understand.
