Alaska’s smaller school districts, including Wrangell, are concerned about how they can implement a major state education overhaul with limited resources.
The Legislature passed the Alaska Reads Act last year, intended to improve student literacy. The 45-page bill adds wide-ranging requirements for school districts, including that they develop intensive programs for younger students struggling to read.
The new law went into effect July 1. The Alaska Department of Education has spent months working on outreach efforts and providing online training opportunities for school districts.
But school administrators say challenges remain.
Officials from larger, urban districts are generally more supportive of the measures and are further along in implementing them. School districts in smaller communities and villages are expressing the greatest worries about impacts to staff and how they can provide intensive reading instruction to a majority of their students.
“The added requirements for (learning) retention will put added stress on teachers, parents and students, as well as the school,” said Wrangell Schools Superintendent Bill Burr.
Alaska has long languished at or near the bottom of national standardized test scores for reading. Seven superintendents wrote in late 2019 that there was a statewide reading emergency, and that legislation was needed to improve outcomes.
The Association of Alaska School Boards was supportive of the reading bill when it was before the Legislature in 2022, and believed that a concerted effort was needed to improve literacy in the state. The stated goal of the law was that every Alaska student would be able to read proficiently by age 9.
“We’re still supportive of it,” said Lon Garrison, the organization’s executive director. “But I have grave concerns that the implementation of it is not being as responsive as it could be.”
‘Unfunded mandate’
Despite the legislation’s $30 boost to the state’s per-student funding formula, just 0.5%, Burr said it’s not enough to implement the Reads Act program, which would cover the estimated 86 elementary students affected by the new requirements this fall.
“If (funding) was initially estimated to fully comply, it would be in the $225,000 to $250,000 range,” he said. “However, we can still meet the minimum standards for a district our size and fit under our current budget with the one-time funding and federal grant staffing.” The Legislature this past session approved additional state aid for schools, but only for the 2023-2024 school year.
In addition, there are administrative costs, reports, testing, screening and other related expenses, Burr said.
Cyndy Mika, superintendent of the Kodiak Island Borough School District, said she moved to Alaska last year from Texas. She said a similar reading intervention program was implemented there, which led to great improvements, but it came with a significant funding boost.
“I am a proponent of this,” she said. “It’s just that we feel like it’s an unfunded mandate.”
Mika estimated the new law could cost Kodiak schools between $2 million and $4 million per year.
School districts have bought new reading course materials subsidized by the state. New qualifications in the science of reading will be required for educators teaching kindergarten through third grade by July 2025. Mika said those courses have been costly for the district and time-consuming for teachers.
Under the law, districts are required to develop individual plans for students who cannot read well. Deputy Education Commissioner Lacey Sanders said by email that of the state’s 53 school districts, just five or six had submitted plans. Mika said the Kodiak district does not have the funding to hire dedicated reading intervention specialists, meaning “all of this is going to fall on our classroom teachers.”
Staffing challenges
Under the Alaska Reads Act, in addition to developing individual plans for students who need additional help, schools are asked to provide afterschool reading instruction and the option of summer school. Parents would also need to be notified 10 times per year of their child’s reading deficits and the child’s efforts to improve.
The Wrangell district has a teacher who oversees two federally mandated programs and the Reads Act requirements, but more staff will be involved, Burr said. “If students are not at the level dictated by the state … then additional tutoring, intervention and practice will be required to achieve proficiency,” he said, that includes speaking with parents about holding a student back a grade level if necessary.
All teachers and principals who serve kindergarten through third grade are required to take classes to get a reading certification on their teaching license, Burr said.
Anne Shade, child development department director at Bristol Bay Native Association, works closely with two school districts. She said that a nationwide shortage of educators is making it difficult to hire additional staff for afterschool classes and summer school, asking, “How are we supposed to do that? There’s not a lot of staff out here in the summertime.”
Gene Stone, superintendent of the Lower Yukon School District, said notification requirements will be a significant administrative task in parts of Alaska where the vast majority of younger students could expect to find themselves in reading intervention programs.
“If 80% of your kids aren’t proficient, you have kind of an unintended consequence,” he said. “It’s pretty difficult to meet that metric of all the meetings, all the progress monitoring support.”
Stone said the Lower Yukon School District — comprising about 2,100 students across 10 Western Alaska villages — could expect to spend $518,000 per year from its general fund to implement the Alaska Reads Act. “Mainly curriculum and supplemental materials to support some of the tutoring and also to have a budget for a summer school.”
At the Yupiit School District, headquartered in Akiachak, there were similar concerns. Superintendent Scott Ballard is striving to center Yup’ik culture in everything the district does, and said he believes the Alaska Reads Act is doubling down on failed policies, with more assessments and parental notifications.
The bill was written to require “culturally responsive education” and Indigenous language learning for reading specialists. Ballard said the district has scrambled to find qualified educators who are fluent in both Yup’ik and English, but that would be challenging.
The state has hired six reading intervention specialists who will work with the lowest-performing 25% of Alaska schools. Sanders, the deputy Department of Education commissioner, said by email that all the specialists have been hired and are being trained. The state anticipates the reading specialists will work with 12 schools in the first year, Sanders said, and more the following year.
The Legislature also approved spending $5 million this year to establish the Anchorage-based Alyeska Reading Institute to tutor students and provide teacher development. Proponents said that would be a valuable resource, while lawmakers from outside Anchorage asked how much difference that would make beyond Southcentral Alaska.
‘A bit bumpy’
Lawmakers last year were bitterly divided over whether the new law would lead to positive outcomes.
The Alaska Reads Act passed unanimously through the Senate, but squeaked through the House by one vote on the final day of the legislative session. Four Bush Caucus members in the House wrote strongly in opposition to the act last February. Dillingham Rep. Bryce Edgmon said recently that some of his concerns about the potential negative impacts of the reading bill to rural Alaska are coming to bear.
He said the bill may have been well-intentioned, but that “it was rushed, it wasn’t that well thought out.”
Palmer Sen. Shelley Hughes was one of the bill’s primary supporters and disputed that depiction. Alaska’s reading bill evolved over the years and was modeled on measures that worked in states like Mississippi, she said, which saw great success in improving literacy.
In an interview, she acknowledged that larger school districts would have a greater capacity to successfully implement the law’s requirements. But she said after several years, Alaskans should be able to judge whether the new programs have started improving literacy.
“This first year is going to be a bit bumpy,” she said.
“Reading is perhaps the single most important skill that a person can use over their lifetime,” Burr said, adding, “It is hard for me, personally, to believe that our teachers’ efforts have somehow not been ‘enough,’ and that test scores and a broad-based screening program will make the difference.”
The Wrangell Sentinel added reporting to this story.
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