By Claire Stremple/Alaska Beacon
Commissioner: ‘If this is a priority, I would like to see more investment made in the Reads Act as well’
Juneau, Alaska (Alaska Beacon) – Even its most ardent supporters say the Alaska Reads Act, a controversial law aimed at helping Alaska students achieve reading proficiency by the end of third grade, needs to change. But the questions of how and by how much are unlikely to be resolved quickly.
A bill from Gov. Mike Dunleavy would make two changes to the Reads Act: It would direct schools to test all students three times a year, not just students whose initial scores indicate they need improvement, and it would allow teachers to wait until closer to the end of the year to have the final discussion about whether or not to hold back struggling students so that the latest testing results could be applied to the conversation.
Commissioner Deena Bishop said the bill was based on feedback from educators.
But it doesn’t address the two things educators who called in to public testimony said they need the most: money and time.
Public testimony was generally supportive of the intent of the Reads Act, but educators and administrators said it was a strain on already tight resources.
Gene Stone, the superintendent of the Lower Yukon School District, said an increased base student allocation, the mechanism for school funding, is crucial to enacting the Alaska Reads Act.
“LYSD spent over a million dollars to comply with the Alaska Reads Act in year one,” he said, adding that his district covered half the cost through competitive grants. “While we continue seeking grants, we still face a minimum annual shortfall of at least $600,000.”
He said the district has already made deep cuts to school programs to save money. “We don’t have P.E. teachers, we don’t have art teachers, we don’t have music teachers. We don’t have all the things that research says that really, you know, make healthy schools.”
One principal, Heather Conn of Stedman Elementary School in Petersburg, said she herself drew up the personalized reading plans required by the law.
“I took the lead on the intervention plans, because who am I going to ask to take this on? This law came with little funding,” she said. “In addition to addressing all the duties of the elementary principal, the only time that I can dedicate to these plans are in my personal time in the evenings and the weekends.”
She, too, wondered how her school would sustain the workload when one-time grant funding runs out.
Bishop said she appreciated the testimony and was aware of the concerns. “It’s actually true,” she said. “We’ve heard some of it. And that’s why we’ve already really been researching the last couple months to find resources and revenue, especially for the difficult pieces like summer schooling.”
The law currently requires 20 hours of summer school if the parents of a student who is not reading at grade level by the end of third grade wish to advance their child to fourth grade.
Bishop said she would like to see a multiplier in the funding formula so that schools are better equipped to enact the law. “If this is a priority, I would like to see more investment made in the Reads Act as well,” she said.
Senate Education Committee Chair and Reads Act supporter Sen. Löki Tobin, D-Anchorage, said she was quick to read the bill into the committee so that legislators could hear from interested parties and take meaningful action before the end of session.
In response to the governor’s bill, Tobin said she knew the Reads Act would need some tweaks, but that she had hoped to work on those in an annual convening of educators, parents, students, administrators, early education experts and Indigenous language experts — as the law stipulates.
“I’m looking for more stakeholder engagement. And that may have happened, it just wasn’t necessarily presented on the record,” she said.
This article originally appeared online at alaskabeacon.com. Alaska Beacon, an affiliate of States Newsroom, is an independent, nonpartisan news organization focused on connecting Alaskans to their state government.
